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THE 



PILGEIM'S WALLET; 



OR, 



SCRAPS OF TRAVEL 



GATHERED IN 



ENGLAND, FRANCE, AND GERMANY. 



BY 

GILBERT HAVEN. 



" From a bag 
He drew his scraps and fragments, one by one, 
And scanned them with a fixed and serious look 
Of idle computation." 









NEW YORK: 

PUBLISHED BY HURD AND HOUGHTON. 

BOSTON: E. P. BUTTON AND COMPANY. 

1866. 



Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1865, by 

HuRD AND Houghton, 

in the Clerk's Office of the District Court for the Southern District of New 

York. 



-^ «| Ul 



.4n 



3^ 



BIVEESIDE, CAMBRIDGE: 

STEREOTYPED AND PRINTED BT 

H. 0. HOUGHTON AND COMPANY. 



To 

ISAAC RICH, Esq., 

OF BOSTON, 

THROUGH WHOSE GENEROSITY, inSTEXPECTED AND UNMERITED, 
THIS PILGRIMAGE WAS ROUNDED TO ITS DESIRED CLOSE, 

gE|)ese l^emorfals 
AEE GRATEFULLY DEDICATED. 



A LETTER OF INTRODUCTION. 




My dear Unknown : — 

HE Pilgrim offers you the contents of his wallet, — 
not the usage of his tribe ; for they seek to force 
your favors from you, rather than theirs upon you. 
You may shrink from such a beggar more than from 
rest of his clan ; for who would not the rather add to a 
vagrant's store, than put his broken scraps upon their table ? 
Yet this is an age of prejudice-conquering, and some miy 
find in these fragments a momentary pleasure, if not value, 
that shall make them welcome visitors to their homes and 
hearts. They are partly gathered from various journals in 
which they were born and buried in one day, — collected as 
from diverse cemeteries to what will doubtless prove a com- 
mon tomb. Many additions have been made, and nearly 
half of it has never, at this writing, seen the light of typo- 
graphic day. 

They are not especially historic, or geographic, or of much 
practical value to anybody. They aim rather to be the hu- 
mors of travel, (perhaps, at times, the ill-humors,) — the balm 
of a thousand flowers, honestly pressed from their leaves, and 
not chemically compounded fi'om the laboratory of Murray. 
Whoever seeks for useful helps is respectfully referred to that 
establishment. But whoso craves a taste of the juices of that 
richest of oranges, Europe, will find, we trust, a pleasant drop 
herein. 

Two classes of readers enjoy books of travel : those who 
have seen the places described, and those who have not. 
If each of these shall patronize the work, the publishers, if 



vi A LETTER OF INTRODUCTION. 

not the author, will feel duly grateful ; for what merchant or 
manufacturer does not desire to have his judgment approved 
by the demand for his wares ? 

It would have pleased us had they been worthier of such 
a demand. Yet the scene and its reflections have been faith- 
fully limned ; so that those who seek the sites may have a 
reliable companion, and those who travel in their easy-chairs, 
or in the pleasanter haunts of Nature, may catch a httle of 
the aroma of the distant and desired spot, somewhat as if 
they stood in its visible presence. 

It is customary in modern works, to acknowledge the 
chief sources of indebtedness, so that the reader may prop- 
erly distribute whatever thanks or blame he has to bestow. 
In conformity with this usage, I would make grateful mention 
of guide-books, companions who lightened the task of travel 
with their fellowship, of but little French, and less German, 
and far from least, of my canes and boots. The last twain 
being the less known and the most useful, deserve especial 
consideration. Of the former, no less than four furthered 
me on my journey. Their lives were brief, but not useless. 
The first that I took as my associate was of English oak. 
It was bought under the shadow of St. Paul's, of a maiden 
all forlorn. I exulted in the thought of its nature, and fan- 
cied that it was cut fi'om Tennyson's " Talking Oak," and 
that it was as garrulous in its dismembered estate as when 
plunged in the grass of Sumner Chase. It kept my com- 
pany through perilous Paris, up the Rhine, and into Switz- 
erland, when, at the foot of Righi, it was exchanged for 
an Alpine stock, its stubbed English shortness unfitting it 
for mountain service. 

That stock made the tour of the peaks and passes, and 
had reached Italian rest and luxury, when it met its fate. 
On Lake Maggiore, between Isola Bella and Palenza, as I 
lay sleeping in the sleeping boat, on the sleeping sea, — three 
drowsy folk together, — my cruel companions stole it from 
my side and cast it into the deep. I had persisted in keep- 
ing this reminiscence of the granite and glaciers amid that 
softened air. They vowed that it should stay near its na- 
tive fastnesses. They were all "honorable men," despite 



A LETTER OF INTRODUCTION. vii 

this deed. So went that flag-staff, whereon, as on a martial 
banner, were inscribed the various victories it had achieved 
over the foes and forces of Nature, and the like of which, not 
a few travellers hang as heirlooms in their homes. 

I soon consoled myself with a highly polished cane of olive, 
raised and wrought by the Lake of Como. Italian warmth and 
grace shone in its color, polish, and form. It was an expres- 
sion of their language, land, and manners. It protected me 
against robbers and beggars, wandered along the Arno, strode 
majestically through Rome, lounged In Naples, tramped 
through the orangeries of Sicily, reeled across the Mediter- 
ranean, played the whip and spur to Alexandrian donkeys 
and their drivers, roamed through Cairene bazaars, climb.ed 
the Pyramids, sailed the Nile, and traversed the Desert : In 
fine, it was fast becoming a highly accomplished cane. Its 
earlier grace assuming the final polish of travel, when it 
met with an accident that reduced it suddenly to poverty 
and permanency. 

The cars from Cairo to Alexandria are open at the sides; 
and the Arabs, Instead of walking In at the ends, leap 
through the paneless windows. One stalwart, barelegged fel- 
low sprang thus upon this gentlemanly cane, shivered its lower 
limb, and made an end of its perfection. It passed as a ho7ine 
main into the hand of a dusky youth at our hotel, whose 
vanity, unless he has outgrown it, probably it serves to-day ; — 
not the first Instance, in that region, of sudden and severe 
change of fortune ; — 

" Fallen, fallen, fallen, fallen. 
Fallen from its high estate." 

The setting of the heart on canes was getting sorely re- 
baked. I maintained a celibate obstinacy through Palestine, 
tempting as were its sacred trees. But Athens " aholere Sy- 
chceum incipit." By the side of the whispering Cephissus, 
in . the groves of the Academy, near the hill Colonus, where 
Sophocles wrote and Plato talked, a fig-tree, straight, young, 
and smooth, beguiled the heart from its steadfastness. The 
stick was cut and carried through many a sacred and historic 
spot in Greece, circumnavigated Its shores, visited Vienna, 
Prague, and Wittenberg, becoming acquainted with Huss and 



viii A LETTER OF INTRODUCTION. 

Luther in their favorite haunts ; spent Christmas in true Ger- 
man style at Bremen, waded through Amsterdam ; explored 
the galleries of the Hague, and was thus clothing itself with 
memory, when it went the way of all its fellows. Stopping 
at the custom-house between Holland and Belgium, I left it 
in the car. On my return, it was gone. Some greedy Dutch- 
man had appropriated my classic stick, and I was again left 
comfortless. 

These, helps, though none of them survived the hour of 
their duty, still deserve commemoration, in the view of 
the sights they so largely assisted in exploring. One other 
helper, more laborious, more continuous, and more fortunate 
in escaping the perils of flood and field, which went with me 
fi'om shore to shore, and served me faithfully in every land, 
shall find thankfiil record here, — my boots. Gayly did 
they march forth ; tattered and rent did they return. Yet 
they came victorious. To their soles clave the soil of many 
lands. The fingers of British, French, Swiss, Italian, and 
Grecian sons of Crispin sewed up their wounds, while huge 
hobnails had made them resist the " ice-smooths " of the 
Alps : now they, alas, 

"By time subdued, — what will not time subdue? — 
A horrid chasm disclose, with orifice 
Wide, discontinuous, at which the winds 
Eurus and Auster, and the dreadful force 
Of Boreas, that congeals the Cronian waves, 
Tumultuous enter, with dire chilling blasts, 
Portending agues." 

The Israelites commended their shoes that had lasted them 
through forty years of wanderings ; Italian Catholics cover 
the shrines of favorite saints with crutches, bandages, and 
other emblems of the diseases their intercessions are supposed 
to have cured ; rags, in like manner, adorn the tombs of holy 
Mohammedan sheiks, — each acting according- to the fashion 
of their heathen ancestors. Following these sacred and pro- 
fane examples, as Horace hung his dripping garments in the 
temple of protecting Neptune, so I these faithful boots in this 
temple of my gratitude. 

" Me tabula sacer 
Votiva paries indicat uvida 
Suspendisse potenti 
Vestimenta maris Deo." 



A LETTER OF INTRODUCTION. ix 

In one point the work resembles some of Its vanished pred- 
ecessors, — the ground it traverses is as familiar as your own 
name. Still, no two persons behold in the same landscape 
the same picture. Their souls affect their eyes, and the vision 
is colored by the medium of their own personality. These 
sketches, therefore, though of scenes so often handled, may, 
it is hoped, be found to be somewhat novel in treatment ; 
not that they equal the great masters of this art, the pen- 
painters of Earth and of Man, from the Odyssey down- 
ward, that will always hang in the central halls and choice 
lights of this palace of art. But in a great house there are 
not only vessels of gold and of silver, but of earth and of 
wood ; and the last may become vessels unto honor, if faith- 
ful in their lowlier calling. In the grandest galleries is 
found room for the happy-hearted Tenlers among his peas- 
ant countrymen, no less than for the sombre Eembrandt and 
the overwhelming Rubens ; for the rapt-eyed Angelico as 
well as for the towering Angelo. Of course, the minor artist 
must expect the major criticism ; for his faults, are, doubtless, 
as many, his genius, less. 

To such fate, this volume bows. And still, as St. Sebas- 
tian, the favorite martyr of the schools, stuck over with 
arrows, may have comforted himself with the thought, that, 
despite the shafts, he yet retained something of the comeli- 
ness and grace that made him the target of his enemies, so, 
perhaps, this work, similarly shot at, may solace Its'elf with 
similar vanity. Nay, let not vanity be attributed to tha,t 
youthftil mart}T. Unconscious of his foes or his barbs, he 
still " commerces with the skies." To such a strain would 
this aspire. Careless of its defects, it will be more than 
repaid. If It shall lead any reader to those heights of speech- 
less peace that he attained, and shall thus assist, in an humble 
degree, in showing that all the kingdoms of the world and 
the glory of them are not the property of the tempter, but 
of tke Tempted ; and that the earth and its trophies, as well 
ajT'tieaven and its glories, are but the outer garments of the 
soul of the redeemed and his Redeemer, the Lord Jesus 
Christ. 



CONTENTS. 



BOOK I. 

ENGLAND AND SCOTLAND. 
I. 

SEA AND SHORE. 

The Ocean from the Deck — Rocked in the Cradle of the Deep 

— Death and the Resurrection — The New Earth — At Home, 
abroad pp. 1-10 

II. 

FIKST THINGS. 

The City— The Country— The Hamlet — The Ruin — Caste in the 
Grave — The People pp. 11-24 

IH. 

THE LAKES AND THEIK POETS. 

Lodore — Windermere — Prof. ^V ilson — Mrs. Hemans — Ambleside 

— Rydal Mount — Grasmere — Keswick — Cockermouth ... pp. 25-54. 

IV. 

HAUNTS AND HOMES OF BURNS, 

The District — Dumfries — Mauchline — Ayr pp. 55-76 



CONTENTS. xi 

V. 

STIRLING AND EDINBUKGH. 

Stirling Castle — Bannockburn — Edinburgh — Some Edinburgh Ce- 
lebrities — Some Edinburgh Graves — Lover's Lane — A Lesson, and 
how it was learned pp. 77-94 

VI. 

THE FINEST WALK IN ENGLAND. 

Coventry — Kenilworth — Warwick — Charlecotte Park — Stratford — 
Shottery— The House —The Church and its Yard pp. 95-110 

VII. 

OXFORD AND CAMBRIDGE. 

Oxford — Magdalen — The Bodleian, Baliol, and Christ Church — Isis 
— Cambridge — Christ's College — Oliver Cromwell — Jesus' Col- 
lege—The Street of Colleges pp. lll-13e 

VIII. 

TOWARDS LONDON. 

Gray's Covmtry Church-yard — Eton — Windsor — The Castle — Run- 
nymede pp. 137-152 

IX. 

LONDON, 

The Plan— The Tower — Westminster Abbey— St. Paul's — Other 
Churches — The Preachers pp. 153-176 

X. 

A NIGHT IN PARLIAMEN*r. 

The Day preliminary — The House — Palmerston — D'Israeli — Horse- 
man — Cobden — Bright — The House of Lords pp. 177-187 

XL 

A BASKET OP LONDON FRAGMENTS. 

The Temple — The Society of the Cogers — Newgate — The National 
Gallery — The Parks — British Museum — The Koliinoor — Cleopa- 
tra and the Sibyl pp. 188-208 



xii CONTENTS, 

XII. 

TENNYSON'S HOME AND ROBERT BROWNING. 

The Isle — The House — The Lawn — The Man — The City Villa and 
its Occupant pp. 209-218 

XIII. 

SOME OF THE SACRED SPOTS OF ENGLAND. 

St. Herbert's Island — Melrose: the JsTew and Old — Lindisfame and 
Jarrow — York Minster — Epworth — Bedford and Elstow — Bun- 
hill Fields and Smithfield — Canterbury pp. 219-253 

XIV. 

LAST LOOK AT ENGLAND. 

Shakspeare's Cliff— The People pp. 254-268 



BOOK n. 

FRANCE. 
XV. 

ENTREE. 

Boulogne-sur-Mer — Hotel Acclimation — Lingual Acclimation 

pp. 271-278 

XVI. 

PARIS. 

From the Arc de Triomphe — In the Streets pp. 279-285 

XVII. 

PARISIAN CHURCHES. 

St. Germain r Auxerrois — Palais de Justice and the Guillotine Gate 
— The Madeleine — St. Germain des Pr^s — St. Roch and Arch- 
bishop Manning pp. 286-305 



CONTENTS. xiii 

xvm. 

A DAY IN PARIS. 

St. Denis — St. Vincent de Paule — A Funeral — The Streets — Palais 
Koyal — Homewards — Bon Soir pp. 306-323 

XIX. 

PICTURES AND PALACES. 

The Louvre — Poor Copies of Great Masters — The Luxembourg 
— The Gobelin Tapestries — Tuileries — Versailles — Fontainebleau 

pp. 324-346 

XX. 

EXTRAIT DE PARIS. 

The Catalan Vial — Homes — The Stores — A la Carte — Au Con- 
traire pp. 347-356 



BOOK in. 

GERMANY. 
XXI. 

TO THE RHINE. 



A Bird's-eye View of Northwestern France — Brussels — Waterloo — 
The Station — Namur — Liege — Aix la Chapelle pp. 359-383 



XXII. 

COLOGNE. 



The Cathedral — The River — Second Sight — St. Ursula— St. Gereon 
— Sta. Maria in Capitolia pp. 384-399 



xiv CONTENTS. 

XXIII. 

A PILGRIMAGE ON THE RHINE. 

Drachenfels — Roland and the Nun — Hummerstein and Andernach — 
Coblentz — Stolzenfels — Konig's Stahl — Rhense — Marksburg — 
Oberspay — A Salute — St. Goar — Oberwesel — Bacharach — The 
Last Ditch — A Storm and Refuge — The End in View — A Grain 
or Two of Common Sense pp. 400- 29 

XXIV. 

FROM WIESBADEN TO MUNICH. 

Wiesbaden — Mayence — "Worms — Heidelberg — Munich : the 
Churches — The English Garden — The People — Gottesacker 

pp. 430-460 

XXV. 

THE CRADLES OP PROTESTANTISM. 

Prague — Wittenberg pp. 461-477 

XXVI. 

CHRISTMAS AND HOLLAND. 

Antwerp — Berlin by night — Bremen — Christmas — Amsterdam — 
Leyden — The Hague — Rotterdam — Rubens — Au Revoir 

pp. 478-492 



BOOK FIEST. 



ENGLAND AND SCOTLAND. 




BOOK I. 

ENGLAND AND SCOTLAND. 




L 



SEA AND SHOEE 

On board Stuameb Canada. 
5 o'clock, A. M. 

AlVI sitting on the after-deck, with pencil and 
paper pressed upon the quaking table of my 
knee. The deck is empty of all forms but my 
own and that of an officer pacing to and fro in a sleepy 
fashion. The morning is hung heavily with clouds, 
through which the sun and I have been vainly striving 
for nearly an hour to get glimpses of each other; for 
my real object in getting up at this hour was to see him 
get up, and for aught I know his real object in rising so 
early was to see me arise. If so, there are two disap- 
pointed creatures in the universe at this writing. 

I must confine my description to things seen, since I 
cannot talk of things unseen. The restless ocean stretches 
for a score of miles in every direction, till it is shut down 
upon by a moveless sky. It is not mountainous, or hilly 
even ; it is only hillocky. Are these the little hills that 
skip like frightened lambs, or those that rejoice on every 

side? With no perceptible law of unity, they keep 
1 



2 SEA AND SHORE. 

bobbing up and down, each after some active impulse of 
its own. The feeling this universal motion creates is pain- 
fully powerful. It is as if a level prairie should begin 
to toss up and down, not in long, broad waves, but every 
rod the centre of an upheaval. You seek rest and find 
none save in the rounded dome above. That is firm as 
the heaven of heavens that bends over weary - tossed 
souls. Sometimes it is filled with contending clouds, 
and then sky, sea, and ship rock with kindred agitations. 
Poor sea, she seems tired, as one sleepless in sick-bed 
tossings, and would fain, I doubt not, hear the voice of 
Christ say, " Peace, be still." Nothing is so dreary as 
this monotonous and meaningless activity. It is truly 
" the houseless ocean's heaving field." A frozen sea, 
at least, is calm ; this is alike unharvestable, and more 
pitiful, as the hopeless writhings of the dying are more 
painful than the icy quiet of the dead. Down into these 
tumultuous depths plunges the ship. Up on their white 
crests she rises, throwing off" from her spurred sides waves 
of foam, and making a green swath behind her, smooth 
and swift and lustrous. All around this boiling centre 
spreads " old ocean's gray and melancholy waste." The 
only life that gladdens it is a couple of birds, long- 
winged, ckid in white and gray, like the sea they skim, 
who go waving up and down like the billows ; joining 
thereto a system of circular sailing such as the ship 
follows. They thereby show their affinity for sea and 
land ; kin to the fish, kin also to man. 

We are about three hundred miles from land, measur- 
ing horizontally : probably about three miles measuring 
perpendicularly. To-morrow morning, and the third day 
of creation will be reproduced. Dry land will appear. 
The earth will stand above the waters. I doubt not 
" the sons of God " congregated on this spot will imitate 
their brethren of old at such a revelation. They will 
shout for joy. How much does man appear in that 



SEA AND SHORE. 3 

august relation wlieii we see him marching triumphantly 
over these boisterous and boundless billows. Behold this 
ship, full of fire, that is steadily burning her way through 
the hostile element ; the mighty, yet most delicate ma- 
chinery, by which she masters it ; the keen, courageous 
eye that discerns all the capacity of the sea, and has re- 
sources ample for its subjugation, and worry not about 
the equality of the brutes until you see a drove of ele- 
phants, beavers, foxes or dogs, navigating themselves from 
continent to continent by such constructions as these. I 
never felt more impressed with the greatness of man 
than as I see him thus walking on the waves of the sea. 
" Thou hast made him a little lower than the angels. 
Thou hast crowned him with glory and honor. Thou 
didst set him over the works of thy hands," even 
"whatsoever passeth through the paths of the sea," — 
yea, and the sea itself. My admiration for Columbus has 
greatly increased, as I look upon the waste, howling wil- 
derness he explored. I think his unknown comrades 
should have more praise than is usually awarded them. 
For the men that would sail for weeks and weeks away 
from the rising sun had a natural, as sublime, almost, as 
was Abraham's spiritual, faith. They went forth not 
knowing whither they went. They sought a country. 
Though it is not a heavenly, yet the old world is con- 
fessing and shall yet more confess that in its institutions 
and privileges it is a " better country." It was a brave 
deed. Let their mutiny be forgotten, and their courage 
and faith in their leader be held in lasting honor. There 
are Bull Runs in the history of every great man and of 
every great enterprise. But they do not stay their 
course. 

Here I have been musing in this cool western wind, 
and on this solitary deck, now dipping like the sea-birds 
down to the edge of the white, green, blue, and black abyss 
seething close beside me, and then rising until I dip the 



4 SEA AND SHORE. 

other way, and fall almost headlong on the deck, when 
the brain begins to swim and the thoughts to lose their 
balance, (a thing which it is very easy for them to do, as 
you will have observed,) and the system generally rushes 
into a " muss," and the delightful disease of sea-sickness 
takes possession of me. I will not describe its manifold 
virtues, lest my feast of ship-biscuit and tank-water 
should create in you corresponding qualms, and you 
should experience one of the disadvantages of foreign 
travel without the subsequent blessings that obliterate 
the memory of that grievous ill. I was unable on my 
first day to follow Lord Byron's example and bid my 
Dative land good-night. I presume she did not feel 
affronted at my disrespect. I was too sick to pay my 
devoirs, and she was too sick to notice my neglect. 
I unhappily found that the ship did indeed bound 
beneath me as a steed that knows his rider, and knows 
how to throw him too. But I have learned to ride him, 
at least when he is gentle and easy to be entreated. If 
he should, however, go to kicking and plunging, as he 
sometimes does, I am afraid my horsemanship would 
not be such as to witch the world. It would surely 
bewitch me. 

If you wish to know what sea-sickness is, get into a 
big cradle on huge rockers, that go both crosswise and 
lengthwise and everywise, and set it in motion, and then 
try to walk its deck. Lie down near the ends of the 
platform where the rockings are most violent; fill the 
room, where it is furiously rolling, with close air and 
sickening smells of oil and gas, and you will have a 
little idea of the state of those who are " rocked in the 
cradle of the deep." I shall abominate cradles and sympa- 
thize with rocking babies more than ever. That torture 
must have come from a seafaring people, who wished to 
accustom their children from infancy to the life they 
must follow, or who had become by practice so enamored 



SEA AND SHORE. 5 

with this experience that they fancied it the perfection of 
bliss. And we adhere to it as we do to a good many 
other absurd usages, such as stove-pipes for head cover- 
ings for men and coal-hods for women, because our an- 
cestors did. Shipboard cures those follies at any rate, 
and brings us to caps, soft hats, and light, fleecy draperies ; 
these last the comely suggestives of the comelier " power 
on the head " which the women of Israel wore from the 
days of Sarah to those of Mary. It was a power on 
their heads, as every enamored Oriental confessed, — a 
power which our dames and damsels can never send forth 
from the flash millinery which draws the eyes away from 
their eyes, and both spoils and despoils them. 

I have a vivid sense of the points made in the exegesis 
of two famous New York clerics when they were crossing 
the reeling Atlantic. As they hung over the taffrail, 
being tossed to and fro, inside and out, by the drunken 
vessel, says B to C, " I shall be glad when I can obey 
Paul's admonition, ' Be ye steadfast and immovable ! ' " 
" Yes," replies C, " here we are always a-bounding ! " 
They were evidently in the condition which the Psalmist 
says those are who go down to the sea in ships, — " at 
their wit's end." " Deep-heaving," Byron calls the 
ocean, and it communicates this characteristic to its 
travellers. But I am discoursing of nausea, ad nau- 
seam. Let us escape to less grievous themes. 

A touching incident occurred a few days ago. A 
pleasant-faced Irish girl was put on board, .in the last 
stages of consumption. Ere the journey was half over, 
her life journey was accomplished. The angel of death 
tracked her over the waves. We had the impressive 
service of burial at sea. She was a Catholic, and 
Bishop Bailey, of Newark, attended the funeral. She 
died in the evening, and early the next morning the crew 
assembled, with many of the passengers, near the gang- 
way. The body was brought forth in a box, having in it 



6 SEA AND SHORE. 

several bars of iron. It was wrapped in the British flag. 
The Bishop pronounced the service, sprinkled her face 
with holy water, and she was launched into the deep. 
May no devouring shark make her his prey, but in the 
still, green caverns of the deep, may she 

" suffer a sea change 
Into something rich and strange." 

The event brought vividly to mind the like burial of 
Coke and Judson. How many have gone down into its 
depths ! The sea, like the land, is one vast sepulchre 
of mortality. Over it, as over that, hovers the angel of 
destruction, — the angel, too, of resurrection. For the 
sea shall give up the dead that is in it. Whether fish or 
worms consume this body, matters but little, for in my 
flesh shall I see God. Let all anti-physical resurrec- 
tionists, of whatever degree of unbelief, be silent ; espe- 
cially let no believers be worried by the enemy, through 
the apparent difficulties of the work. Let them not ask 
how can my Christian boy, whom the fiends of Manassas 
boiled into candles, — how can that flesh, which those worse 
than cannibals so villanously consumed, shine incorrupt- 
ible ? The chemist can see, with his scientific eye, every 
particle of once solid matter floating gaseous in his retort, 
and can almost replace them in their original relations. 
What man can almost do, cannot God easily do ? All 
these dissolved particles are held in this little retort, the 
Earth. God sees them in solution. God tracks them in 
all their, to us, unknown movements in other bodies. 
God can, in his own time and way, recollect, reunite, re- 
animate, resoul them. There is one verse which no 
pseudo-spiritualizing of Scripture can evade or explain. 
" For our conversation is in heaven, from whence also 
we look for the Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ, who shall 
change our vile hody, that it may he fashioned like unto his 
glorious hody, according to the working whereby he is able 
to subdue all things unto himself." There is the statement 



SEA AND SHORE. 7 

of the fact, and of the power to execute it. Take it, 
troubled soul, and feed upon it in your heart, by faith, 
with thanksgiving. 

Some ministers stop to drink in the midst of their 
sermons. What would we think of race-horses that 
stopped to water three or four times in their flight to 
their goal? Following their bright example, I have 
stopped to drink, eat, and sleep several times since the 
above was concluded. My rearing and pitching steed 
was too much for my pen. It was like trying to write 
on the head of a horse that was trying to throw you. 
Even the Country Parson would shrink from that effort 
The ship would not cease its motions : so my hand must 
from its. 

Again I am on the after-deck at five o'clock in the 
morning. More passengers pace it, or lean over its 
taffrail. We are driving up the Channel, and the mir- 
acle which I foretold is accomplished. Dry land has 
appeared. It arose yesterday morning — the earth of 
Ireland standing in the water and out of the water. We 
rounded Cape Clear and skirted the shores of the " sweet 
isle " in the mild hours of the Sabbath morning. A Sab- 
bath of rest was upon the waters, a Sabbath of rest on 
the land. The iron-like cliffs sloped gradually up and 
down into pleasant hills and valleys. All these were 
partitioned off by hedges into green pastures and black 
gardens. Every inch of soil down almost to the rocky 
point of Clear was thus polished into perfection. The 
sight was a surprise. I expected to see a green but 
neglected region. My life-long idea of Ireland was 
changed in the twinkling of an eye. The dry land, as 
mere land, would have been lovely ; but to see the earth 
new created in so finished a manner, was what Adam, 
from his experience, perhaps, might have expected, but 
not an American. I wondered where the poverty was 
of which we have seen so much and heard more. Yet 



8 SEA AND SHORE. 

as I looked I could see how it could arise, though its 
offensive presence did not afflict the eyes; for these 
fields and farms seemed almost void of life, save such as 
the still kine and scarcely stiller vegetation afforded. 
There they lie, evidently as carefully tended as a royal 
child, but only occasionally a modest or elegant mansion, 
or a little hut, shows the personal presence of man. 
Then I saw how a spot no larger than this could be 
crowded with millions of souls, and yet be apparently 
uninhabited. The souls are jammed into corners or 
hidden in bogs. Romanism increases the degradation of 
tenantism, and rum completes it. 

A pleasant Sunday passed, closing in services in which 
a Presbyterian and a Methodist united. The cosmo- 
politan character of a ship's company, and the rapid 
fulfilment of Daniel's prophecy concerning the inter- 
course of the world, is seen, when we consider that 
among the score or two of worshippers in that little 
cabin were dwellers in England, Nova Scotia, the West 
Indies, Sandwich Islands, Switzerland, and all parts of 
the United States. These all heard the word with joy 
we trust, and believed. 

The Church, and especially the clergy, are well repre- 
sented on board. No less than ten ministers form a part 
of the human freight. Of these, five are Roman Catholic 
bishops, one a monk of the order of La Trappe, one a 
member of the State Church of Scotland, one of the 
French Reformed, one a New School Presbyterian, and 
one a Methodist. Had a storm arisen, caused by a flee- 
ing Jonah, it would have been hard to tell which should 
have changed his close berth here for the scarcely closer 
quarters inside one of the great whales that spouted 
around us. Yet it was not very difficult to find the 
Judas among the twelve, and it might not have been to 
have found the Jonah among the ten. Those out of 
whom the successor of Peter comes would have probably 



SEA AND SHORE. 9 

escaped. They were a very pleasant and social set of 
gentlemen. Their merriment was ceaseless, yet not 
unepiscopal. How could it be ? You would never 
imagine you were with the men that hold the keys 
of life in their grasp, — the hierarchs of the hierarchy. I 
took my first lesson in Romanism under these circum- 
stances. I shall not give the conclusion of my opinion 
on so brief an induction. May they see their true rela- 
tion to the Bishop of our souls, and be so guided by Him 
that they shall lead the flocks that come to them for spir- 
itual food where there shall be one fold and one shep- 
herd. 

And now, at the weaiy close of a busy day, " we have 
touched the old world, — to us the new world. We have 
stood upon the soil of our forefathers and find ourselves 
an alien." We have found " sweet fields beyond the 
swelling flood, all dressed in living green." We are 
brought to the haven where we would be. A new book, 
old in fact, but like a famous classic to a young pupil, 
new to us, is opening its wondrous pages. While many 
sights seem familiar, others convince one that he is in 
a foreign land. The docks, the carriages, the amusing 
Punch and Judy, the feats of mountebanks in public 
squares, the old and solid look of the houses, all wear a 
foreign air. Even the boy who, failing of securing the 
charge of our valise, asked for a penny to drink " your 
honor's health," was far from American, we are glad to 
say. We advised him to join the Temperance Society. 
He would have much preferred the penny to the advice. 
That request bespoke the great characteristic of the 
people of Europe, — drink, drink, drink. It is the bane 
of all peoples — the evidence and bond of degradation. 

The carriage sets us down in the noisy centre of the 
city.. How great the difference between sea and shore. 
The silence and emptiness of the ocean, whose fiercest 
waves make no sound in their fiercest leapings, whose 



10 SEA AND SHORE. 

wliite hands clap in gliostly dumbness, are suddenly ex- 
changed for the hideous Babel of meaningless noise. Man 
can do nothing without a hubbub. God does nothing 
with. The stars run their rounds noiselessly. There is 
no speech nor language : their voice is not heard. The 
pettiest movements of man are drowned in uproar. Yet, 
so perverse are our natures, we prefer the tumult to 
the silence, and this most unlovely of towns seems be- 
witchingly beautiful beside the cold, heartless, treacherous 
sea we have traversed. Even its funereal pomp looks 
cheerful, and long into the long twilight we feast on 
homeful sights and sounds. Europe is of the earth, 
earthy ; Englishmen of humanity, human. Welcome 
to earth and man : with all their faults, we love them 
still. 





n. 

FIRST THINGS. 




IRST impressions are most impressive. Let 
me sketch, therefore, my first sight of an English 
^ city, landscape, hamlet, and ruin. 



THE CITY. 

My easel is planted in the misty brightness of an 
English May morning, at a lofty chamber of the Victoria 
Hotel, looking out on the superb St. George's Hall, with 
the pleasant voices of birds coming down from above, 
and the harsh voice of labor and traffic coming up from 
below, — the voice of man just going forth to his work 
and to his labor unto the evening. Yesterday morning 
we took possession of this till then, to us, undiscovered 
country. For, how much soever you may put faith in 
geographers and travellers, there is no conviction like 
sight. " Seeing is believing." The eye of faith, which 
is the eye of the soul, alone lends " a realizing light " to 
the dreams of the fancy and the deductions of reason : 
so the eye of the body knows, undoubtingly, what it 
sees. This country has thus been literally discovered 
by me. 

Liverpool itself has less attractions than any great 
town in Europe. With no antiquities, with few modem 
flowerings of its enormous wealth, it is a congregation of 
dingy warehouses and of involved streets, glutted with the 



12 FIRST THINGS. 

wheels of traffic. Its stores are small, its palaces mean. 
One building and one park alone redeem it. St. George's 
Hall and Birkenhead Park are superior, in their kind, 
to anything in London. The first is a magnificent pile, 
costino^ about two and one-half millions of dollars. It 
stands on a rise of ground, in a large open area, an oblong 
structure of gray sandstone, surrounded c«i every side* 
with tall pillars up to the roof. Its entrances and the 
hall itself are grand. Polished columns of various colors 
— gray, white, and red — stand around the walls, with 
statues of Peel, Stevenson, and eminent Liverpool citizens, 
sprinkled among them. The floor is of polished ^ mosaic, 
inlaid with texts from the Scriptures : a common and 
beautiful practice here is this adorning of halls, fountains, 
everything of beauty, with these divine amulets ; an 
equally common and painful defect with us. 

Birkenhead Pai'k is across the river, to which the 
meanest sort of scow-boats ply. A Fulton-Ferry steamer 
would astound the people, and make the fortune of the 
Yankee that should introduce it. The park is exquisite. 
In landscape properties the Europeans are thoroughly 
conversant, and in which, with all our progress, we are 
still far behind. But they have several thousand years 
the start, and then land is so common with us that it 
ceases to be prized. This charming park is in its ful- 
ness of beauty. Mildest of sheep and liveliest of lambs 
are in one enclosure, perfect in form, with a certain air 
of " quahty " which even the higher classes of the ani- 
mals here learn to unconsciously assume. In another 
section, gentlemen and ladies are engaged in archery. 
It looked healthful and graceful. In bending their great 
bows, they bring many muscles into exercise. It would 
be an admirable adjunct to our Ladies' Academies. 

Wild roads run among dripping rocks, thick bowers, 
winding lakes, and the softest of grass, while a flow of 
music from all the birds in the air crowns the whole. I 



FIRST THINGS. 13 

am no adept in ornithology, and if I were, I should as 
soon think of discussing Jenny Lind's dress and features 
while listening to her heaven's-gate singing, as to dis- 
cuss the physical peculiarities of these songsters while 
drinking in their melody. I cannot tell you in what 
key they sang, nor if some critical orchestra leader might 
not have snubbed them as uncultivated. I would only 
like to see his art beat their nature. 

Men, women, and children were enjoying it, though 
but very few in number. Not two hundred persons 
were there at this happiest hour of closing day. The 
same law holds there as in St. George's Hall. These 
splendid luxuries are for the wealthy few, not for the 
ignoble many. 

But we hasten from this too familiar town into thelong- 
dreamed-of and most ancient 

COTJNTRY. 

I was "booked" from Liverpool for Kendall, sixty 
miles north, and at the foot of the Lake District. " Book- 
ing " is simply getting your ticket, which is precisely 
such a piece of pasteboard as is used in most of the 
United States, with the date on one corner and the num- 
ber on the opposite. 

We pass out of the city through a tunnel three miles 
long, and I know not how many dark. An endless rope, 
to which a stationary engine was attached, whirled us 
up into daylight. Then commenced our first acquaint- 
ance with English scenery. From our little flying cell 
we fill our eyes with the landscape of England ; and 
truly our eyes do not dislike to be so filled. How rich 
is the grass in color and quality ! — soft, thick, deep- 
tinted, — a Wilton carpet has Nature spread over this 
earth. It is full of blood : the best kind of vegetable 
life flows in its veins. It is handsomely figured also, 
with trees of like richness of foliage, with daisies, and 



14 FIRST THINGS. 

blossoming orchards, so that the whole is a garden, broken 
up by charming hedges into spaces where the brown soil 
is marked off into beds, or covered with the growing 
grain. The higher life of animals sets off the scene. 
Sheep and kine sleep or saunter along the hill-sides and 
under the trees, — they, too, showing the fine effects of 
culture. Villas embosomed in shrubbery, and halls 
splendid with parks, flash past us, showing that the high- 
est life of all fittingly cro^vns the scene. 

Alas, that this is only an exponent of the possibility 
of man here ; a prophecy rather than the expression of 
his present general condition ! For what strikes you 
with a sense of pain that is not to leave you, however 
far you wander eastward, is the condition of the people. 
With all this perfection of insensate and sentient Nature, 
with these occasional expressions of the height to which 
human comfort can go, the mean and dirty huts in which 
the people of England herd show such poverty and 
misery as blacken all the surrounding beauty. You are 
riding through Lancashire, the seat of the great woollen 
and cotton factories, the home of starvation. For the 
American war cast its shadow over this land, and the 
government of England had commended to its lips the 
chalice it had sought to make us drink. 

But apart from this especial calamity, the regular life 
of these masses is most deplorable. A row of one-story 
plastered huts, with two rooms at the most, thatched, 
whitewashed sometimes, but frequently not, with a rude 
stone floor, a bed in a recess made in the wall, a few bits 
of furniture, without books or papers, or a multitude of 
thino-s that have lono: since ceased to be luxuries to 
our people, and are as essential as our daily bread ; 
thus live the millions. Man, the head of the creation, is 
at the foot. All other creatures but the human creature 
are carefully cultivated ; this as carefully neglected. 
True, philanthropy works in these cottages, and piety not 



FIRST THINGS. 15 

unfrequently glorifies them ; but the system of govern- 
ment, the institutions of the land, are against the develop- 
ment of the people, and Christianity can only mitigate 
their condition, not raise them out of it. 

The land lies vs^ithout inhabitant. One is surprised at 
the immense extent of unoccupied country. For miles 
and miles stretch the fields, carefully hedged and culti- 
vated, yet without a house. This is everywhere the 
same. And what few houses break the elegant monotony, 
except the rare mansions of the nobility, are usually the 
little, low-roofed cots where herd the tenants who gain a 
scanty living from the fruitful earth. Much as I admire 
the perfection to which careful and scholarly culture has 
brought this land, I felt as never before the unspeakable 
superiority of America. May she prize and preserve 
the blessings with which God has crowned her. 

These estates rarely change hands ; more rarely do 
they get divided into small farms. The utmost that a 
laborer can accomplish is to rent a farm ; and these rents 
are enormous : two, five, and even ten pounds an acre 
have to be paid. Ten dollars an acre for rent, a thousand 
dollars for an ordinary farm, is the least ; and this does 
not include the various taxes, which are many and heavy. 
Of course these renters have to struggle hard to make both 
ends meet, and such a thing as improving their dwellings, 
or bettering the state in which they were born, is as far 
from their thoughts as a patent of nobility. 

THE HAMLET. 

Two hours of such flying visions, and I set foot on the 
grassy English earth. Sending my valise forward, I 
swing the haversack over one shoulder and a shawl over 
the other, and enter the ancient borough of Kendall. 
How funnily the streets and houses look ! One or two 
moderately wide thoroughfares wind through the town. 
The sidewalks are paved with cobble-stones, and the cen- 



16 FIRST THINGS. 

tres macadamized. This is like everything else, for the 
roadway is chiefly for carriage-riding, and hence needs 
better care than plebeian footpaths. But the plebeians 
have wits, and use the middle of the road also. Every- 
body walks there, and the sidewalks are left for rainy days 
and green Yankees. My greeimess, that bit of it, soon 
left me, and I took the aristocratic middle, and found that 
in medio iter was the pleasantest, if not safest, as it usu- 
ally is said to be. 

The^ next thing that strikes you is the aspect of the 
houses. They are compact together, low-roofed usually, 
but sometimes rising several stories, made of tipped-up 
slate stones, small-windowed, dingily whitewashed, of an 
unvarying and most unfascinating appearance. 

Then you notice the multitude of public houses. Al- 
most every house in the main street is an inn. It sets 
forth the name of the man or woman, often the latter ; 
the name of the house. Swan, Black BuU, King's Arms ; 
and underneath, " Licensed to sell ale, beer, and spirituous 
liquors." Eying these signs with a hungry look, I saw 
one marked "Temperance House." I concluded that 
would do for an experiment. Entering, I was shown 
into what they call a "*Commercial Room," the only one 
in the house you are expected to enter, except your bed- 
room. Here, upon ringing, you can have whatever you 
order, and pay for only what you have. They are so 
far, therefore, a great improvement on our hotels, where 
you must pay for much you do not want, and where the 
cost of living is consequently much higher than at these 
comfortable homes. There are no loungers around the 
doors, or in the rooms. Everything is as still and deco- 
rous as in a private dwelling. I most heartily approve 
of this British institution, and wish that the temperance 
sort could be imported to America. 

After a good dinner I go forth to see the town. The 
side and back streets are more novel than the main ones. 



FIRST THINGS. 17 

• 

They are only a narrow paved walk between rows of 
high plastered walls. The rooms are crowded and com- 
fortless. Children and adults rattle over the stones in 
their wooden clogs, sounding like horses' hoofs on the 
pavements. Unspeakable crookedness and narrowness 
characterize the streets. Alleys, lanes, closets they some- 
times call them, wind about like a swimming eel for size 
and tortuousness. Yet, let it be spoken in their praise, 
the streets, even in their out-of-the-wayest corners, are 
very clean. They look as if they were swept daily. 

Not a tree, not a garden-plat, adorned the nakedness. 
I had no idea before of an English village. I supposed 
it was akin to ours. But though I have seen many 
since, some of which had some slight adornings, not one 
approaches the beauty of our towns. We are as far 
ahead in that as in the institutions, of government. 

Picking my way through these narrow and twisted 
affairs, I come to a style, and pass into a beautiful field. 
For all around this spot, where twelve thousand persons 
are crammed into less than a mile square, are miles and 
miles of a most lovely country, with only here and there 
a stately mansion, where some old or rich family dwell ; 
no older, probably, than those in the village, but called 
old, and hence called gentle, and expecting often, on 
meeting, a touch of the hat from these ancient servitors, 
which, of course, is not returned. 

THE RUIN. 

Entering the field, we get our first sight of a ruin. 

It is that of an old castle built by the barons of Kendall, 

overhanging the town. What one has read about from 

childhood, what he has dreamed of, and desired to see, 

and expected to die without the sight, when he really 

comes to see it, may seem to him cheap and tame. An 

enthusiasm that is fantastical is always spoiled by sober 

matter of fact. Many a reader of these lines — if they 
2 



18 FIRST THINGS. 

shall have many a reader, which is doubtful — has been 
affected with this American feeling. We feel our new- 
ness ; we crave age, its flavor, its connection with past 
generations, with the past eternity. I may not express 
my own feelings, moderated as they must be by the real 
presence of things long dreamed. Much less shall I rise 
to the height of your feelings, which have suffered no 
rade intrusions of the reality. 

On a knoll that swells up several hundred feet from 
the valley, slumbered the ruins. The walls are built of 
small stones, well mortared, and rise bold and lofty from a 
deep fosse, now dry, that encircles them. The towers at 
the corners, some round and some square, look threaten- 
ing even in their decay. Ivy covers the broken walls, 
and grass grows rank within them. It was not so grand 
as the first we saw fropi the cars ; the huge castle of the 
house of Lancaster, whose blood runs in the veins of 
the Queen, and whose name was a terrific battle-cry in 
the wars of the Roses. " Old John-of- Gaunt, time- 
honored Lancaster," looked frowningly on us from its 
towers. He must have looked more frowningly on the 
walls themselves, for the castle is now the county-jail, 
— a better use than it was once put to, yet hardly as 
dignified in his estimation or in that of the world. 

But this castle was the first I had ever visited, and so 
none, however great, can take away its rights of primo- 
geniture. The comparatively humble seat of the barons 
of Kendall will stand before Stirling, Windsor, Ver- 
sailles, or any other grander spot awaiting my pilgrim 
feet and eyes. I peopled its walls with bowmen and 
spearmen. I saw watchmen on its towers descrying the 
northern enemy. I saw the arrows and javelins fly 
down on the scaling hosts. The tumult, the distress, 
the flood of civil war had raged around it. Inside these 
empty walls, too, how much revelry and anguish, peace- 
ful blessedness and unspeakable grief, had abounded. 



FIRST THINGS. 19 

• 
Catherine Parr, last wife of Henry VIII., was born here. 

Very proud were her parents then ; prouder when the 
king made her his wife ; but not less happy, were they 
alive, when she escaped the knife, by which he cut the 
silken cord so many times, only because death first mur- 
dered the royal murderer. Now the great name of 
Parr has ceased to live, unless the pills that bear that 
title, and that keep afresh the memory of the longest 
lived, if not the greatest lived of that name, may be said 
to unite Queen Catherine and her family with this 
generation. 

The view from the hill was enchanting. "A rich 
and balmy eve " — such an one as Coleridge enjoyed 
when he, too, " lay by the ruined tower," and sang the 
sweetest of the songs of love — encompassed a rich and 
balmy landscape. A high, rolling, but thoroughly culti- 
vated country was on every side. Birds sang in the 
branches, cattle and sheep grazed in silence. Every- 
thing that could make the soul happy, if lower things 
could do so, was at hand. Yet sin corrupts and sorrow 
clouds many a heart here. Heaven, not earth, Christ, 
not man, can make a real -paradise. The past glory and 
gladness are gone. Where are they now, these haughty 
barons and their servile retainers, bluff Harry and proud 
Catherine? "Thou turnest man to destruction, and say- 
est, Eeturn, ye children of men ; " " But Thou art the 
same, and Thy years have no end." The same God is 
here that was present then ; a God of judgment, a God 
of mercy. The same hills, too, are here ; the same 
skies, the same human hopes, cares, sins, sorrows, joys ; 
the same Comforter, the same Redeemer. 

A locomotive breaks up our musings. The present 
is here. The wit of man subduing the strength of man ; 
the collier, Stevenson, greater than all the barons of 
William. Then, too, we are oddly enough transported 
to America, and to all her troubles, by a boy below us 



20 FIRST THINGS. 

• 

attempting to whistle " Dixie." What a jumble it casts 

us into. The Britons fighting and yielding to the Ro- 
mans, who built fortifications just below us ; the Scotch 
and English wrestling for centuries all over this region ; 
Henry and his loves ; noble and serf ; Stevenson and 
the modern nobilizing of the mechanic ; and here comes 
" Dixie," to represent slavery and democracy, and the 
struggle far over the seas, and democracy at last taking 
its stand in Dixie's Land, to live, not die, in Dixie. So 
will it take its stand here, ere many generations. It 
represents none the less the race who are its suppositi- 
tious authors, and who, by their songs and sorrows, 
•*re taking captive the heart of the world. 

CASTE IN THE GRAVE. 

Descending the hill, we pass through a new cemetery 
that grotesquely exhibits the religion and the casteness 
of England. It is in two parts. A road runs between. 
Two handsome stone chapels, just alike apparently, 
though unspeakably different in the eye of a true 
Churchman, stand opposite each other at the several 
entrances of the grounds. One lot and chapel is for 
Dissenters, one for Churchmen. A gentleman told me 
that in a parish in Yorkshire, where the road did not 
kindly cut off the sacred from the accursed earth, the 
clergyman refused to perform the consecrating services 
until they had built a wall at least three feet high and 
six feet deep between the parts, — this depth being that 
to which the graves were to be dug. He said he saw 
one cemetery on the hill-side, where the Church had the 
upper, and outside Christians of course the lower section, 
in which, after consecration, the earth was removed 
from the upper to the lower parts, thus giving uninten- 
tionally the poor Dissenters quite a sprinkling of " the 
sacred soil," for which, I suppose, they were truly 
grateful. 



FIRST THINGS. 21 

But another Anglicism was added to this, showing 
that this aristocracy is chiefly of money. There are in 
the consecrated ground three classes of graves. These 
spots are marked. To bury in the first class costs fifteen 
shillings j to bury in the third, five shillings ; and so 
for lots, for monuments, inscriptions, everything. The 
first, second, and third-class cars run through the grave- 
yard. And it is simply a matter of money. Not titles 
and coats of arms command exclusive control of the 
grand first division of that country churchyard. If the 
duke will not pay but five shillings, he must sleep in a 
third-class grave. If the weaver will pay the price, he 
can be eat by first-class worms. 

Can the force of caste go farther ? But it will never 
do for us to throw stones at this nonsensical feeling. 
A light mulatto lady sat at our table on the vessel, 
another entered the church before me yesterday, each 
as unnoticed as myself; but for an American to treat 
unconsciously his neighbor thus, for a church to treat 
unconsciously a communicant thus, — I have yet to see 
it. The last sight I saw there was a colored minister, 
known to the sexton to be a minister, thrust into the 
last pew, and that too as if he felt himself disgraced by 
having to perform such service to such a creature, — and 
this in- abolition Boston ! Even in a cemetery near 
New York this like iniquity is committed, and their 
bodies are buried without its gates. Let him that is 
without sin among us cast the first stone at the silly and 
siuful prejudices of England. 

THE PEOPLE. 

"We talked that evening with citizens of the village of 
temperance, slavery, and the war. The first is really 
progressing in this land ; the last two they needed light 
upon ; but events were shedding the light that no dis- 
course could give. The usual questions that perplex 
foreigners troubled them. 



22 FIRST THINGS. 

" How can you move your armies over such immense 
territories ? " they said. 

" How did you move your armies over India ? " we 
reply. 

" But the people will be estranged by civil war." 

" Why are not England and Scotland so estranged ? 
They have covered all this region for scores of miles 
with each other's blood." 

" But the South and the North are naturally divided 
in race." 

"How can that be when Davis, and Stevens, and 
Slidell, are all of Northern origin ? " 

" But what are you going to do with the slaves after 
they are free ? " This foolish question had even got 
over here. 

" Let them alone. Did not you know that you were 
all slaves here once, and are children of emancipated 
serfs ? and have not you taken care of yourselves, and 
would not you do it better yet, had you no higher classes 
above you ? " And I opened my guide-book and read 
as follows : " The barony of Kendall was granted by 
William the Conqueror to Ivo de TaiUebois, in which 
grant the inhabitants of the town, as villains," — that is, 
bond or serf tenants, — " were also included. But they 
were afterward emancipated by one of his descendants." 
They are not fully emancipated yet, and if they do not 
hasten, the black slave of America will get his full lib- 
erty first. They had never seen it in this light, and it 
was hard to make them feel that their fathers were 
" born thrall " to the barony of Kendall. 

Starting out in the evening, I met one of the new 
volunteer rifle clubs, which is the present passion of 
Young England. And well it may be ; for the privi- 
lege of bearing arms has never before been granted to 
this people. Their masters have as carefully forbidden it 
as our slaveholders have the same boon to their slaves. 



FIRST THINGS, 23 

And for the same reason. They have relaxed under 
the pressure of Napoleonic fears. It may yet breed 
other and more terrible fears. For nothing gives a man 
such a consciousness of strength as the voluntary shoul- 
dering of a musket. They may soon ask, " Why is it 
that I who can carry a queen's arm, cannot a queen's 
vote ? " Bayonets breed ideas, even in the most stolid 
brains. 

One base notion infected them. The band emulated 
the boy under the castle-walls ; it, too, essayed " Dixie." 
I asked the thoughtful son of my landlord why tkfy did 
not play Yankee Doodle. He said they did not know 
that tuHe. They will yet learn it, and astonish their 
lords and themselves with that ringing and revolutionary 
quickstep. 

The easel set up yesterday morning in the chief 
square of Liverpool, must be taken down in this se- 
cluded and romantic spot. The edge of novelty is gone. 
The Old World is touched and tasted. All before us are 
but variations of to-day. Ruins, rank, servitude, his- 
tory, — we have the key to them all; we have seen 
them all. The novelty ends where it begins. 

And yet, not so. For here commences another and 
higher curiosity. The homes and haunts of genius are 
just before us. Wfe are on the edge of the Lake Dis- 
trict. Though ten miles from the nearest lake, the ideal 
waves ripple at our feet. The ruin that overhangs us 
has been frequented by Wordsworth and commemorated 
in his verse. So has the old church near us. Kit 
North has tramped these hills, and Coleridge has eat 
opium and muttered inspiration in some of these old 
hostelries. To-morrow we shall follow up the paths 
that we have just struck. . Never did hunter or Indian 
thrill with more emotion on discovering the trail of 
long-looked-for game. The expectancy of the morrow 
buries in forgetfulness the acquisitions of to-day. 



24 FIRST THINGS. 

I have revised this experience of my first ride on an 
English railroad, first sight of an English landscape, 
village, and ruin, in an old room in Ayr where Tara 
O'Shanter and Souter Johnny spent that stormy night in 
carousing, and whence Tam set out on that memorable 
ride by AUoway Kirk. They still dispense here the 
John Barleycorn that gave Tam such a gust of valor, 
which, however, like all di'unken courage, deserted him 
when he most needed it ; and village souters and neigh- 
boring Tarns "get fou' thegither," and see ghosts and 
imps of darkness as they did. But no Burns exists to 
chronicle their drunken visions. As I have taken noth- 
ing stronger than coffee in the famous inn, you "will see 
nothing Burnsish in these scribblings, wherewith the 
place and me, and so you, are connected. But then you 
will see nothing Tam O'Shanterish either, and genius 
had better be away than flooded forth on the fumes of 
alcohol. 




in. 




THE LAKES, AND THEIR POETS. 

LoDORE House, near the Falls op Lodore. 

ET me transport you to this spot and hour. 

It is a lovely evening of an English May. 

The sun has just made a golden set. But 
lis light lingers longingly in the sky, as loth to follow 
him to his bed in the cold and restless ocean. Though 
it is after nine o'clock, one can easily read by the twi- 
light, so high are these English latitudes. Before the 
still hostelry where we sit, the Derwentwater lies " quiet 
as a stone," under the mountains, that rise near her 
shores black and grand, and hardly more stonily calm. 
We are in the Lake District, famed in the verse of 
England's latest laureates, and in the prose of multi- 
tudinous tourists. Southey's " Falls of Lodore " made 
us walk three miles to see if poetry and fact agree. 
They might, perhaps, in a rainier season. The rocks 
are here, but most of the water is gone. Like all 
scenic affairs in this land, it is small beside those of 
America. But the rocks and the water have a wild 
and romantic look. The lake is more beautiful, and the 
mountains around it more sublime. 

Shall I take you on the tour that I have for the last 
three days been enjoying ? I trust you will not become 
as weary in walking with your eyes through the descrip- 
tion as I have been in acquiring the materials for it. 
Yet you may be more. For the luxury of sight more 



26 THE LAKES, AND THEIR POETS. 

than repays the cost of seeing. Nevertheless you may 
get a less reward for a less outlay ; and it is always 
well to remember that knowledge ever requires some 
sacrifices of those who would obtain it ; so that if you 
escape with such small charges as a tired brain im- 
poses, pay your bill without grumbling. 

Next to seeing and talking with great men, is seeing 
their haunts and talking with their confidants. It mat- 
ters little whether the confidants be equals or valets. 
The last are often the best. I have just enjoyed con- 
versing with some of the old Mends of those who have 
lifted this section out of obscurity into fame. They 
were favorite servants, or familiar friends and next-door 
neighbors. My gleanings are chiefly connected with 
Wordsworth, who seems to have filled all the region 
with his presence. The lesser stars that round him 
burned, however, leave no slight track in the heavens 
from which they have vanished. Professor Wilson, De 
Quincey, Hartley Coleridge, Southey, Wordsworth, Dr. 
Arnold, and Mrs. Hemans, aU resided here. But of 
these. Hartley Coleridge and Wordsworth seem to have- 
left the deepest impression on the general mind. They 
do not, however, forget Kit North. 

The Lake District, which, geographically speaking, 
comprises eight or ten lakes, from a mile to thirty miles 
in circuit, is situated in the northwest corner of Eng- 
land, near the ocean, and is not over forty-five miles in 
extreme length and breadth. I started on my tour of 
inspection from Kendall, ten miles from the lower edge 
of Windermere, the lowest and most famous of the series. 
Like the chief personage in the chief poem that is con- 
nected with this region, — " The Excursion," — I was a 
solitary. Like him I was afoot, and had a pack slung 
on my shoulder, and, though not exactly a peddler, was 
picking up what I might afterwards sell if I could find 
anybody foolish enough to buy. And so I concluded 



THE LAKES AND THEIR POETS. 27 

to follow him to the end, and relieve my solitude as well 
as increase my information by conversations with travel- 
lers or dwellers on the route. 

It was a pure " English " Spring morning. The air 
was mild and full of the music of birds. Folds of mist 
hung along the sky, not dense enough for rain, and yet 
sufficient to subdue the force of the sun. No wonder that 
this is so great a country for pedestrinating. It is per- 
fectly fitted for that business, which is most unpleasura- 
ble in hot and dusty America. The road, hard, dustless, 
and smooth almost as polished granite, wound between 
hedges and walls, the last predominating in this hilly 
district. Yet these walls have a finished and agreeable 
aspect, such as they rarely exhibit in our country. They 
are carefully built in the wildest and most mountain- 
ous places, as well as on the roadside and around the 
homestead, as if they were intended for both ornament 
and duration. It is a very difficult matter to climb 
them, and you are compelled to follow the old paths 
here, despite your Yankee cravings for new explora- 
tions, and Yankee dislike to enforced restraints. I made 
some attempts to break away from these straight though 
very circuitous ways, but, like our Southern brethren in 
their like efforts, ignominiously failed. 

The reason of this uniform excellence is not, as is 
often said, because of the English notion of building for 
wear, but because nearly all these places are owned 
by a few rich and titled persons, and they enwall the 
whole land as carefully as an American farmer of 
wealth, taste, and good sense enwalls his acres. They 
do this also as much to keep men out as to keep sheep 
in. Did the poor renters own their farms there would 
undoubtedly be some variation to the elegant monotony ; 
for freedom, whether social, civil, or religious, has its 
shady as well as sunny side. 

Climbing the hill from the town, I halted to rest on 



28 THE LAKES AND THEIR POETS. 

the gate of a garden where a man was at work. . On 
inquiring, I learned that he was under an overseer, 
who carried on the farm for the gentleman that resided 
there, who himself leased it of the corporation of Cam- 
bridge University, It struck me oddly that the first spot 
of land which I should talk about should belong to a 
university that I had always heard of, and that spot, 
too, far away from the colleges, and in an out-of-the- 
way locality. It shows that there are no out-of-the- 
way localities in England. She is as small and as 
well known as one of her ancient mansions. It also 
showed how difficult it is for the poor to rise here or 
even to get their living. He was the fourth who was 
making a living out of this soil. Now, however rich 
that soil may be, its fourth root when extracted will 
hardly amount to much. Yet he had a family of thir- 
teen children, nearly all depending upon him. I advised 
him to send his grown-up boys to America and follow 
himself as soon as possible. His eyes brightened as I 
described the beauty, fertility, and, above all, cheapness 
of that goodly land. How like a Paradise it looks to 
the crowded poor of the world ! 

A mouldy, monumental pillar next attracted my at- 
tention. I asked a passer-by its object. " It is not 
known," he replied. " Some suppose it to have been 
erected by Oliver Cromwell." Another stirring up of 
historic memories. The past flies up in your face at 
every step. So the stout regicide planted his name in 
this gentle landscape. The principles for which he con- 
tended, but which he, like Napoleon, practically aban- 
doned, shall yet prevail over all this land, brought hither 
from America and from Washington, a far greater than 
Cromwell or Napoleon, for he knew how to rule his 
own spirit as well as to expel one proud an^ powerful 
nation, and mould another, more proud and more pow- 
erful. 



THE LAKES AND THEIR POETS. 29 

When a mile toward Windermere I turned off to 
visit a peak from which an admirable view of the Lake 
District, it was said, could be obtained. The beauty of 
walking in England is through the fields, in these pubHc 
and ancestral paths. A pleasant stroll through the grass, 
and I halt for directions at a little stone hut hidden in 
a grove of magnificent sycamores, — a tree much re- 
sembling our maples. Among their tops great flocks of 
daws or crows were keeping up a screeching music, 
such as I have heard some choirs achieve. These birds 
are probably praising God to the best of their poor 
ability, and so are free from blame. I wish the same 
excuse protected the choir. I found the estate belonged 
to the Earl of Lonsdale, whose residence is twenty-five 
miles above *us. I climbed to the top of Underbarrow 
Scar, a precipitous cliff several hundred feet high and 
several miles long. The prospect was well worthy of 
the effort ; a broad valley rolling up often into moun- 
tains that were really majestic. Every inch of the vale, 
and far up the sides of the hills, and often over their 
tops, it was turned up as with the spade, or sheared 
as with the knife. All through it were scattered cot- 
tages, looking white and comely at this distance, and 
had their tillers been lords of their farms, the beauty 
would have been perfect. But not one probably of them 
all owned a foot of the soil he wrought. And vast 
spaces, miles square, were unoccupied by man. Laid 
out as carefully as a garden, looking exquisitely lovely 
in their coats of green and brown, and girdles of green 
or gray, they were desolate and without inhabitant. 
The lords of the land are shrewd men of business. 
They only wish for tenants enough to carry on the farm, 
and the rents are so high that but few can command the 
means for leasing any of the land. I asked a stout- 
looking man on my way hither, ploughing in a field, if 
he rented that lot ? 



30 THE LAKES AND THEIR POETS. 

" Ay," he replied. 

" For how much ? " 

" Two poonds an acre, sir." 

" How many acres are there ? " 

" Aboot foive." 

Fifty dollars rent for that patch of ground ! No 
wonder that he grumbled at the hard times. And that 
was cheap to what many pay. Twenty-five, and even 
fifty dollars per acre, are sometimes paid. 

While on this Scar, I fell into a very natural blunder 
for an American. Seeing a moderate sheet of water on 
my left, I supposed I was gazing on Windermere. I 
indulged in the raptures appropriate to such occasions, 
and then set out along the top of the ledge toward it. 
Walking a couple of miles, and finding a p^th into the 
valley, I descended, and inquired at a little stone cot- 
tage for Bowness, the town on the lake which I was 
seeking. The old lady looked surprised, and said I was 
nowhere near that place. The water I had seen was an 
inlet of the ocean, and I had a long and tedious tramp to 
the road from which I had strayed. Readying it and 
pursuing it for several mUes, I overtook a wagoner, 
such an one as Wordsworth celebrates, a simple but 
most honest man, who kindly showed me a cross-path 
to the village. So, walking a mile through the fields, I 
struck the brow of the hill, and 

1 WINDERMERE 

lay before me. Some very eminent names in English 
literature have swelled in enthusiasm over this lake. 
So you must not call my talk " high-falutin " if I do like- 
wise. I shall fall far short of them. Nestling beneath 
majestic crags, lies a little sheet of water, a mile wide 
and about ten miles long. It is the perfection of quiet 
beauty. Not a ripple on its surface except a few cut by 
the oars of dainty-looking boats. An island is in the 



THE LAKES AND THEIR POETS. 31 

centre, of thirty or forty acres, laid out in parks and 
walks, for. hundreds of years the residence of a titled 
family. The whole scene, but for the hills, would be 
petite, lovely as a babe, yet but a babe. They give it 
character. Some of them are three thousand feet high, 
and they roll and rise in true mountain glory. I did 
not look for this. I expected but moderate hills. The 
lake is but a pond, the hills are mountains. 

This then is the land that is clothed with the gar- 
ments of imagination. Here had lived poets, wits, and 
scholars. Their eyes had seen it, their feet had trodden 
it, their voices had filled it with wit, pathos, philosophy, 
and fancy. That hill some lines of Wordsworth conse- 
crates. That scene Kit North has glorified. Scott 
has sailed this lake, and Coleridge mumbled philosophy 
and poetry along these paths. What is earth without 
man ? How memories of past genius drape a land- 
scape in richer robes ! Admirably does Ruskin set this 
forth in his Lamp of Memory in the " Seven Lamps of 
Architecture." Go and read it, you who only admire a 
forest primeval and the savage life that has roamed 
beneath it. 

Our untrained feet were thoroughly tired with their 
long walk of a dozen miles. The rest of the body 
and the spiritus inter sympathizing with their weariness, 
I " turned into " the couch Nature had provided, and 
under the trees, hedges, and cloudy skies with which she 
had so pleasantly covered it. " Truly our bed was 
green." Let me give a piece of .advice to all pedes- 
trians. When you rest yourselves, take off your shoes, 
for the feet are the hardest worked and the most tired 
part of you. We have not the Oriental custom of giving 
our feet full play by using sandals merely, but bandage 
them up in woollen and leather in as foolish a fashion as 
the Chinese. We are as ashamed of exposing them as 
the Oriental ladies are of exposing their faces, and with 



32 THE LAKES AND THEIR POETS. 

just as good reason. However, what you may do or not 
do in good society, when in " our best society," that of 
Nature, and, weary with walking, take your feet out of 
their prison-house. So did I plant my " feet among the 
English daisies," and very kindly they greeted and com- 
forted me. 

After a sleep which, Coleridge said hereabouts prob- 
ably, " is blessed from pole to pole," I put my feet in 
their fetters and entered the village of Bowness. This 
is comely for an English town, but bears no approach to 
the beauty of an American village. The houses are of 
stone or clay, usually of the latter, one story, dirty, tree- 
less, grassless, yardless, blindless, paintless. This being a 
watering-place, there were some of a better style of cot- 
tages for lease and lodgings, new and of stone, with 
occasional bits of shrubbery. But most of the people 
live here as elsewhere, in the humblest of conditions. 
Passing through the busy little spot, we enter the road 
to Ambleside. It winds at first through thick woods 
and along the margin of the lake. It soon ascends a hill, 
over the view from which Professor Wilson thus ecsta- 
sizes : " There is the widest breadth of water, the rich- 
est foreground of wood, and the most magnificent back- 
ground of mountains not only in Westmoreland, but, 
believe us, in all the world." Let no one accuse Amer- 
icans of extravagance of expression after this. I loitered 
on the brow of the hill and gazed upon the most perfect 
landscape " in all the world." It was charming indeed. 
The land rolled down from our feet rich with verdure. 
Trees, scattered or combined into thickets, sprinkled it. 
Handsome cattle and sheep sauntered over it. The calm 
waters of the lake kissed its shore, and beyond, the 
• uplifted heads of England's loftiest hills looked down 
upon us, stern and calm as couchant lions. But that it 
touched the top of earthly reahties was simply absurd. 
There are more perfect views on Lake George, and on 



THE LAKES AND THEIR POETS. 33 

the Hudson : far grander ones in Italy and Switzer- 
land. There was a lack of sweep and breadth to the 
picture. This " widest breadth of water in the world " 
was less than a mile across. It seemed as if you could 
take all the mountains into your eye as well as all the 
lake. The sense of completeness gave it a sense of 
'.mallness. The stretch of view which our landscape 
affords gives it a feeling of greatness, as a marching 
army whose rear lines are invisible wonderfully increases 
its power. 

PEOF. WILSON. 

Being near the early and long home of the enthusi- 
astic professor, I turned aside to see it. It was on a 
high hill overlooking the lake. His old gardener and 
body-servant, who lived with him for over twenty years, 
was there still. He showed me the cottage where he 
wrote most of his brilliant editorials. It was an humble 
house of two low stories, nestling under great trees. A 
wide-spreading, full-leaved sycamore stood just before 
it. Here was his favorite seat, on which he used to 
spend whole nights in the summer months when getting 
up his papers for " Blackwood." Those nights were 
therefore outwardly as well as inwardly ambrosial. He 
wrote nothing on these occasions, but sat all night in 
this hrown study. This occurred but once or twice a 
month, when the pressure for "copy" crowded him. 
While in this state he would not bear being addressed 
or approached ; but the brain being delivered of its bur- 
den, he was as merry and playful as a kitten. 

He was a wild fellow in those days, and the " Noctes " 
are probably more literal than fanciful in some of their 
scenes. I heard some good stories of him the afternoon 
that I stopped at the door of the church at Grasmere. 
The rude old church, built far back in Saxon times, was 
undergoing its annual cleaning. Some of the vestry- 



34 THE LAKES AND THEIR POETS. 

men were overseeing the work. A merry old gentleman 
was among the number. He asked me about the war. 
I told him, with the usual unwisdom of that hour, that 
" it was nearly over." " Ye oor't to send for the Gras- 
mere men," said he. " They 'd roon in a minute if they 
heerd that we were cooming. Why, in the old wars 
with Napoleon, we were ordered oot, but only got as 
far as Kendall," [about fifteen miles south,] " when Nap 
heerd that we were cooming, and instantly surrendered. 
Professor Wilson was in the reg'm'nt, and we had jolly 
times, livin' on thirteen pence a week, a piece of bread 
and meat, and two Toms " [glasses of grog] " a week. 
Once Wilson put his bread and meat on his bayonet 
and offered it to an old woman : ' Tak' it hoom to your 
ain wife,' said she ; ' I 've noo doot she has plenty 
of occasion for 't.' " This was told in the queerest 
of accents, and received with roars of laughter by the 
surrounding rustics. He told how Professor Wilson had 
long red locks hanging down his shoulders, and declared 
they should not be clipped. But the officer ordered 
them off, and they had to come. " For," said the officer, 
" when ye 've a black coort on, ye may be a gentleman ; 
but in a red coort ye 're nae better than the rest." 

He said Wilson was famous for jumping, wrestling, 
and all athletic games, and when he could get no one to 
jump with him on a wager, he would bet against himself. 

He altered very much in later life ; for his gardener 
told me that for the last fifteen years of his life he ate 
but two meals a day, and drank nothing stronger than 
soda-water. Like most men, he was bitten with the pas- 
sion for building. This snug cottage, in its cosy nest, was 
too cramped for his improving fame, if not fortunes. So 
he undertakes to build a more stylish house on a knoll 
in front of this, commanding a fine view of the lake and 
mountains. But he was like one that began to build 
and was not able to finish. His habits were far from 



THE LAKES AND THEIR POETS. 35 

economical, and his means, liberal as was his income, 
were not equal to his ways. So he stayed in the little 
cottage till his children were grown up. He occupied 
the :!ew home but a few years, leaving it for the Edin- 
burp'- University. " The last night I spent with him," 
said ji '-^ gardener, " we rowed all the night past a new 
house then just built on the opposite shore of the lake 
in imitation of a castle. Back and forward we plied 
the boat till morning, under the walls of 'the castle,' 
master sayirig nothing, except now and then murmur- 
ing, ' Egad, it looks as if it had been built for cen- 
turies.' " 

MES. HEMANS. 

Another mile or two of pleasant walk beside the lake 
and we pass " Dove's Nest," a summer home of Mrs. 
Hemans. Look up on your right. Under yon high hill, 
in that snug recess, half hidden from the eye, is a plain, 
dingy, two-story dwelling, looking neglected in itself and 
its grounds. That is the spot out of which with sad 
eyes she often gazed down on this road and across the 
lake, closing her vision with the Furness Fells, — a high 
range that were as the walls of her prison. She was 
very unhappy when here on account of domestic troubles, 
and I fancied her in .this mountain solitude like Tenny- 
son's "Mariana in the Moated Grange." That dreary 
scene is laid upon a flat, desolate moor. Yet the hearts 
of the deserted maiden and the deserted wife were not 
unlike, and as she gazed on this lovely yet lonely pict- 
ure, she felt the force of those doleful words, — 

" She said, 'I am aweary, aweary: 
God, that I were dead ! ' " 

A mile of wooded walk and we are in 

AMBLESIDE. 

The hills get nearer, and the little hamlet climbs their 



36 TEE LAKES AND THEIR POETS. 

sides and nestles in a very narrow valley between them. 
It is at the head of the lake and at the foot of the Lake 
Poets, for the consecrated spots, rarely occurring below, 
begin to increase rapidly here. We pause at the thresh- 
old, and, weary with walking, we seek a home in one 
of these pleasant dwellings hidden in shrubbery, out of 
whose window peeps modestly the word " lodgings." 
This was meant for permanent boarders, as a summer 
resort. We find access, and delightful ease, and aban- 
don. Whoever wants the true relish of an English 
home, let him try such quarters as these. The inn, espe- 
cially if a temperance one, is pleasant, but this is restful. 
Up rose the sun, still hiding his face in Oriental style, 
but very glorious in his cloudy apparel. The great 
hills came out of the darkness, and the little hills re- 
joiced on every side. The memorials of Wordsworth 
begin here and stretch about three miles north. In that 
space all his adult life was passed. Thirty miles farther, 
near the Northern Ocean, was his birthplace, but here 
the children of his soul were born. An elegant Gothic 
church, close by, has four memorial windows, dedicated 
to him, his wife, sister, and daughter. The chief is to 
Wordsworth. It has three central figures, of Moses 
with the law in his hands, David with crown and harp, 
and Aaron with priestly robes and the lights and per- 
fections, the Urim and Thummim upon his breast. 
Around these are Miriam with her tabret, the willows 
of Babylon with the harps and the wallers, Elijah fed 
by the divinely-prepared food for his wUdemess wander- 
ings, angels with trumpets, and other emblems of Scrip- 
ture and song. It struck us that Peter's vision would 
have been better than Elijah's smoking table, for if any 
poet has ever taught us to call nothing in nature com- 
mon or unclean, it is Wordsworth. Far above Milton, 
Shakspeare, Scott, Homer, and all, did he see and say 
that what God had created and cleansed, that we should 



THE LAKES AND THEIR POETS. 37 

not call common. But they had not enough of his 
nature to illustrate his nature, and shrank from painting 
the great sheet full of four-footed beasts and creeping 
things on their handsome window. And so the author 
of the " Idiot Boy," " Peter Bell,'* « Goody Blake," and 
" The Cumberland Beggar," he, who made a peddler 
with his staff and pack, the hero of his chief poem, 
lacks his most fitting representation in this memorial win- 
dow. " Veritas " is over all of the panels of each window, 
and, whether the family coat of arms, or the motto of the 
donors, is the best word that could be used, for truth 
was his whole being's end and aim. Leaviug the church 
and striking a foot-path, we cross the narrow meadows, 
having the ivy-covered, modest dwelling of Miss Marti- 
neau on our right. A little further on and we pass 
Fox How, the summer residence of Dr. Arnold, and 
now occupied by his widow. This is a spacious man- 
sion, hidden in a dense park, with a lawn gliding down 
from its front — that is, its rear, the usual front of 
English mansions — to the brook that babbles through 
the meadows. This brook is dignified with a name and 
the surname of river, for here every brook is a river, 
and every river a brook. 

Wind round under the hills half a mile further, and a 
gorge opens on your left. High and rocky, bare of 
trees, but covered with a thin robe of greenness to then* 
summits, they rise before you, behind you, on every side. 
Enter this gorge, walk a few rods, turn up the hill on 
your right, — remember that we were looking north, — 
go up about an eighth of a mile, enter a gate on your 
left, and you are in the modest grounds of 

RYDAL MOUNT, 

the long and last abode of Wordsworth. It is an old 
house, plastered and yellow-washed, two-storied, with 
diamond windows, roomy though not spacious, and has a 



38 THE LAKES AND THEIR POETS. 

very comfortable and snug aspect. The Avalks wind 
around it, lined with laurel, intermingled with trees and 
flowers. A lawn opens in front of the house, and a 
neat old man is raking the grass and sweeping the walks. 
He was his personal servant for twenty-five years, and 
is retained by the present proprietor for the benefit of 
visitors. He takes me a few score of feet to the front 
edge of the lawn, where it slopes off rapidly. There 
are some old seats of the poet, where he sat, and looked, 
and mused. These seats are characteristic of him. 
They are simply round blocks set in the ground. He 
would have no settees, rustic or iron. Nature, or as 
near as he could get to it, was his motto. 

The outlook from this slope was very impressive. 
The Laughrigg Fells rose up immediately before. 
Mountains are called fells. This usage illustrates an ob- 
scure line of Byron's, — 

" To sit on rocks, to muse o'er flood and fell." 

Behind, rough and precipitous, was Knab Scar. Down 
the valley was Ambleside and its mountainous back- 
ground, and at the end of the vision was the northern 
edge of Windermere. It was certainly a poetic spot, 
and I did not wonder that these hills had affected the 
vision and the faculty divine with which he was so 
largely endowed. The grounds cover several acres, and 
are plainly yet artistically laid out. They are mostly 
deep-shaded, and end in a path to Grasmere, along the 
side of the mountain. Other wooden blocks are placed 
where the best prospects open. The servant said, 
" Master used to pace up and down these walks, talk- 
ing to himself and rubbing his hand upon his breast 
inside of his shirt," and directly over his heart. That 
was his habit when composing. So violent and so con- 
stant was this exercise that his buttons were rubbed 
off almost daily, and when on his travels, the servant 



THE LAKES AND THEIR POETS. 39 

had to lay in an extra stock to replace the poetic 
waste. 

Near the foot of his grounds stands the little chapel 
where he regularly worshipped. It is new, small, plain, 
and uninteresting. His pew is in the front corner, the 
reading-desk projecting over it. How characteristic of 
ihe priest of nature ; as near as possible in the sanctuary 
would he identify himself with the priest of grace. He 
felt their oneness. " The holy to the holiest leads ; " 
Nature to Christ. In this temple he finds the light by 
which he can see and serve in the lower one that mate- 
rial skies enclose. For, he says, — 

"By grace divine, 
Not otherwise, Nature, we are thine." 

The walk along the side of the mountain to Grasmere 
was one he was fond of taking, and where he always 
carried his special friends. So I pursued it. As I 
passed out of his grounds, I spied some violets blossom- 
ing under a large tree near a mossy stone. Probably by 
that same stone the parent of those little flowers might 
have been blooming when he passed by, and made one 
of them immortal in the well-known lines, — 

"A violet by a mossy stone. 
Half hidden from the eye, 
Fair as a star when only one 
Is shining in the sky." 

The power with which his character impresses you 
was strangely revealed in an incident, otherwise worth- 
less, that occurred just as I passed out of the high, rude 
gate that shut the garden from the adjacent woods. In 
these woods, overhanging the mountain-path, was a large 
old laurel-tree. Desiring some memento of the spot, I 
thought a cane cut from one of its gnarled boughs 
would be most fitting. So I mount the wall and tear 
off the straightest limb. Instantly, I felt like " a guilty 
thing surprised." His nature, his motto, " Veritas," his 
words in " Nutting," all sprang upon my conscience 
like avenging deities. 



40 TEE LAKES AND THEIR POETS. 

" I felt a sense of pain when I beheld 
The silent tree and the intruding sky." 

I knew "there was a spirit in the woods." I 
feared lest some one should come along the path and 
take me for a murderer. The guilty stick grew 
crooked as a serpent, and almost crawled and hissed be- 
fore my affrighted eyes. I hid the coveted criminal 
beside a fountain on the pathside, and going back 
to the house, called out the servant and asked the 
privilege of cutting a stick from the old laurel. He 
gave it as carelessly as he would a chip, stone, or daisy. 
I was surprised at his indifference. How light and 
cheerful my heart sprang up. How gladly I accepted 
the favor ! The old hag of a branch appeared to my 
bewildered eyes " a phantom of delight." The turmoil 
ceased within, and if the spirit in the woods was not 
appeased, the spirit in me was. The history of that 
crooked stick belongs to this story of its birth. I car- 
ried it with me through all my English walks, startling 
villager and conductor with its quaint ugliness. I put 
it out to a London cane-maker, but he could make noth- 
ing of it, any more than his literary kindred could 
' whilom of its rustic master. It crossed the sea with 
me to Paris, cumbered a friend's study there for a six- 
month, resumed its journey back to England, crossed 
the ocean, and, after being the centre of many dreams, in 
which the surprise and smiles and scrutiny of friends 
formed the encircling life, as to its being truly Words- 
worthian and a' that, it was ignominiously left under my 
berth, and probably tossed in the bay, and, picked up 
by some wharf-mouser, disappeared in the dirty stove 
and meagre fire of a North River cellar. Stevens's 
crocodile met an honorable fate, being recast into his 
native stream. The laurel stick of Rydal Mount had 
an unworthy end. I truly hope that the tides bore it 
out of the river, and after due tossings and sea-sickness 



THE LAKES AND THEIR POETS. 41 

it was cast upon the shores of its native land, where 
the Lake District touches the ocean, — 

" And in sheltered coves, and reaches 
Of sandy beaches, 
It has found repose again." 

Pursuing the mountain path I soon pass the rear of 
the farm where De Quincey married and spent many- 
days, and where Hartley Coleridge lived and died. It 
ran up the steep hill-side, and looked wonderfully green 
and lovely. At its foot, not many rods off, is a smallish 
cottage, embowered in ivy,' as charming a bit of snug 
gentility as one can see in England, — more than he can 
out of it. Before it lay, in exceeding peace, the little 
but lovely Rydal Water. A farmer named Simpson 
dwelt here when these young geniuses flew into the vale 
and perched on his roof-tree. His daughter Mary was 
a very handsome girl, and soon the Opium Eater was 
troubled with other suspiria de profundis than those 
created by that drug. I did not learn whether he was 
cured of the heart-sickness by getting possession of the 
fascinating cause, or whether this disease of an inflam- 
matory imagination, like the other, was only increased by 
indulgence. I have no doubt she was of. less injury to ' 
him than the opium. Her old neighbors speak in the 
highest terms of her beauty and amiability. Her home 
was certainly enough to make her 

" The sweetest thing that ever grew 
Beside a human door." 

In such a bower, with such exquisite verdure around it, 
and great woods beside it, and sweet Rydal Mere before 
it, and solemn hills suddenly closing in the vision on every 
side, how could she be aught but lovely? A happy 
marriage it was, despite his eccentricities and poverty. 
Mrs. Wordsworth, I learned, was not so handsome. Hav- 
ing often read that tenderest of his madrigals, the only 
one in which he seemed to reveal his whole soul, com- 



42 THE LAKES AND THEIR POETS. 

mencing, " She was a phantom of delight," I was a 
little curious to know if others saw the beauty in her 
which he beheld. So, overtaking on this walk above 
Mary De Quincey's home an oldish woman whose hut, 
like Goody Blake's, was " on the cold hill-side," and 
who, for aught I know, was the Imeal descendant of that 
successful pray-er, she told me of the beauty of Mary 
Simpson. I asked her if Mrs. Wordsworth was hand- 
some, " Very or nary, sir." " And Mr. Wordsworth ? " 
" Very or'nary, too, sir." His servant, on my saying he 
thought her handsome, quietly answered, " She might 
have been to Ms eyes, sir." So " the perfect woman " 
was all in his eye. He would probably say that his 
was a poet's eye, that could detect what never was on 
sea and land ; and as all join in commending her good 
sense and kind heart, perhaps her real beauty was none 
the less than that of her outwardly lovelier neighbor. 
Before we reached the end of that path, a shepherd 
boy stood in the pasture, and by various phrases was 
directing his dog far up the mountain to gather up 
his sheep. His calls seemed more like orders in words 
than inarticulate commands. The dog understood the 
changing phrases, and scampered here and there, accord- 
ing to the directing voice, and even went upon and over 
the lofty summits in his appointed search. The familiar- 
ity of the two suggested Michael and his 

" Two brave sheep-dogs, tried in many a storm." 

The storms and the sufferings and perils of sheep and shep- 
herds, that he so feelingly describes, all lived before me. 
A mile or more and we come down from our moun- 
tain path and enter the vale of 

GRASMERE. 

This is the most rural of all the lake hamlets. It is in 
many respects the finest, and is more than any other asso- 



THE LAKES AND THEIR POETS. 43 

ciated with the poets. Imagine a valley nearly round, 
about a mile in diameter. Very high hills enclose it on 
every side. The only visible outlet is toward the north, 
and this is through a narrow pass and up a high road, 
whose summit is nearly a thousand feet above the valley. 
At its lowest part nestles a bit of a lake, — a quiet 
pond ; a little too genteel, perhaps, for such a name, 
but worthy of nothing greater. In this narrow area, 
shut in on every side, stand three houses, occupied at 
various times by the poet, and others occupied or fre- 
quented by his associates, Coleridge and De Quincey. 
As soon as we enter it from Rydal, we come to the place 
he first lived in. It is a story-and-a-half cottage, mor- 
tared and whitewashed, looking no better, except for 
whitewash, than many of the rude houses around it. A 
room used as his study is now a huckster's shop. 
The house is owned by the proprietor and occupant 
of " Dove's Nest," Mrs. Hemans's home on Windermere. 
The tenants were intelligent, and were talking of emi- 
grating to America. 

In this cottage of two small rooms he lived with his 
sister before he was married, and here he brought his 

" Perfect -woman, nobly planned, 
To warn, to comfort, to command." 

Behind this cottage he had enwalled a little plat of rising 
ground, with shrubbery, grass, tiny rocks and trees, and 
from its topmost point an outlook to the grand scenery 
that surrounded it. Here were penned, or rather uttered, 
some of his tenderest ballads and sublimest musings of 
philosophy divine.- He removed hence to the rectory, 
a comfortable house near the church, and thence to an 
elegant residence called Allan Bank, at the northern 
extremity of the valley, and on a high slope under 
protecting crags, and that took in all the sweep of the hills 
from its windows. A little above the centre of the vale 
stands the old church of Grasmere, a most venerable 



44 THE LAKES AND THEIR POETS. 

pile, having been built many centuries, — a quaint, 
homely structure, with rough pillars, blackened roof, 
great, unpainted, square pews and stone flags. The 
house was full of washing women and lounging men. 
Its old face was naturally wrinkled and swarthy. It 
had had a thousand annual washings ; yet this company 
of chattering men and women seemed utterly unmindful 
of the scores of generations who had laughed and jab- 
bered and splashed the water on its rude slabs. Kindly 
does Providence hide with flowers the inevitable lot. 

From these jolly vestrymen I gathered much informa- 
tion. Chief among them was a Mr. Green, to whom I 
have referred, as having, with Kit North and the Gras- 
mere men, frightened Napoleon into submission by merely 
starting for the field. His dialect was grotesque in the 
extreme, but his information was full and his loquacity 
abounding. Wordsworth, De Quincey, and Hartley 
Coleridge were his intimate friends. He helped to move 
Wordsworth from the little house where he lived several 
years after his marriage, to the rectory. He helped to 
bury his children. " He always stood in prayer in the 
old church," he said, " his head bent forward, leaning on 
his arms, in a posture of profound devotion." His seat, 
large, unpainted, venerable, seemed sacred as the Burn- 
ing Bush ; for here that wide-visioned soul had often 
looked with humble-lidded eyes into the heaven of 
heavens. It was my wish — ungratified alas ! to visit 
the church at Horton where Milton worshiped when he 
wrote his earlier poems. But as deep-souled a man as 
Milton here quietly worshipped with surrounding and 
unapprehensive rustics for many years, sending his mus- 
ings, like mountain breezes, out upon the land, and wait- 
ing in patient poverty the slow but certain echo, which, 
solidified, is Fame. Over his seat is a medallion-head, 
under which is a tablet, with this most simple, touching, 
and uf^.ighborly epitaph upon it : 



THE LAKES AND THEIR POETS. 45 

To the memory of 

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH, 

The true philosopher and poet, 

Who, by the especial calling of 

Almighty God, 

Whether he discoursed on man or nature. 

Failed not to lift the heart 

To Holy Things, 

Tired not of maintaining the cause 

Of the poor and the simple, 

And so in perilous times was raised up 

To be a chief minister 

Xot only of noblest poesy, 

But of high and sacred truth. 

This memorial 

Is placed here by his friends and neighbors 

In testimony of 

Respect, Affection, and Gratitude, 

ANNO MDCCCLL 

Behind this gray old pile is a small graveyard, and a 
well-worn path leads you to three simple slate slabs, 
which mark the spot where his and her sisters sleep, and 
Wordsworth and his wife. Close by is the grave of his 
daughter and of two young children, one of whom has 
some memorial lines of his father's on his head-stone. 
As they express something of his religious as well as 
parental love, and are not found in any of his books, we 
transcribe them. The lad's name was Thomas, and he 
died Dec. 5, 1812: — 

" Six months to six years added, he remained 
Upon this sinful earth by sin unstained. 
0, blessed Lord, whose mercy then removed 
A child whom every eye that looked on loved, 
Support us, teach us calmly to resign 
What we possessed and now is wholly thine." 

Nothing could be plainer than the grave of the poet- 
laureate. His own name and his wife's, — for they sleep 
in the same grave, — without date of birth or death, are on 
a low head-stone not two feet high. How like the man ! 
" He hated all pretension," said an old Mend and neigh- 
bor, talking with me as we stood beside the grave; 
" he disliked all fuss." Once when they were burying 



46 THE LAKES AND THEIR POETS. 

some one here, and were making a great parade around 
the grave, he drew near, paused a moment, and turned 
away, saying petulantly, * Why don't they bury him 
and have done with it?' Some yew-trees which he 
assisted in planting are near his grave. A brook mur- 
murs in the meadow close beside it, and the mountains, 
grand and peaceful, with "the most ancient heavens," 
still " fresh and strong," look down upon him who loved 
them with so sincere a love, not for themselves, but for 
Him who made them and filled them with sacred influ- 
ences to every seeing eye. Near him sleeps his friend 
Hartley Coleridge. Early and dangerously wounded in 
the battle of life, he dragged his ruined body and almost 
ruined soul painfully through its long, and, to all out- 
ward sense, useless pilgrimage. This friend, and others 
that I met in the valley, gave me many reminiscences 
of these two. They are far better remembered than 
the elder Coleridge or De Quincey, as their stay here 
was brief. 

" Wordsworth was a queer man," said Mr. Green, 
" in his habits ; walking alone, speaking to no one, with 
his hand thrust into his bosom, and he working it up 
and down over his heart with great earnestness, and 
mumbling to himself in what seemed inarticulate tones. 
'T would n't do to disturb him then ; for he was busy 
making poetry." 

Another neighbor remarked that he had often seen 
him at midnight, thus walking and mumbling, with his 
sister a little distance behind, catching his words as 
they fell, for the purpose of writing them down. A 
strange pair surely they must have appeared to the hon- 
est villagers. No wonder ■ one of these short-sighted, 
self-important old men should feel as he did, when he 
said to me, " Woordsworth wa'n't woorth mooch to this 
region." He supposed that he himself was of far more 
consequence, and doubtless ascribed the great rise of 



THE LAKES AND THEIR POETS. 47 

property here, and the great influx of people, permanent 
and transient, into the country, to his own sagacity. He 
never saw how the great, homely, awkward, ruminating 
poet was the instrument that opened the eyes of all 
England to the loveliness of this sequestered seat, and 
drew great multitudes to enjoy its beauty. A woman, 
whose father kept a tavern for many years at Grasmere, 
said she had often been frightened as she was coming 
home late at night, when she heard this mumbling sound 
approaching her. 

Just put yourself in the Wordsworth posture, walk 
off vigorously, rubbing your hand earnestly over your 
heart, working your mouth so that you can just make 
out the guttural tones, and repeat the grand lines on 
" Revisiting Tintern Abbey," or " The Ode to Duty," or 
those on the " Intimations of Immortality," or those on 
" Music." Thus wrest from your heart and throat such 
lines as these : — 

" Our life is but a sleep and a forgetting; 
The soul that rises with us, 

Our life's star, 
Hath elsewhere had its setting, 
And Cometh from afar. 
Not in entire forgetfulness, 
And not in utter nakedness, 
But trailing clouds of glorj'-, do we come 
From God who is our home." 

It will give you a new idea of the oddity and sublimity 
of genius. 

The inscriptions on the walls of the church show that 
Wordsworth was to the manor born. His substance of 
soul is kindred to neighboring spirits, though its quality 
is far superior. My gossipy guide showed this when, 
pointing to the baldest of rhymes, commemorative of 
the death by burning of the first wife of Dora Words- 
worth's husband, he said : " There's foine poetry for you." 
It was the barest bones of the laureate, as skeleton hills, 
uncovered with grass, or trees, or cattle, or clouds, the 



48 THE LAKES AND THEIR POETS. 

common-sense and commonplace where he often wan- 
dered, made servile by its thoughtless simplicity. 

A sign in a neighboring valley shows this native 
quality out of which his genius grew into strange 
majesty and beauty, yet ever retaining, in its loftiest 
flights, reminiscences of the earth out of which it "was 
taken. Thus reads the pre-Wordsworthian strain : — 

" O mortal man who livest on bread, 
What is't that makes thy nose so red; 
Thou silly ass, that looks so pale, 
It is with drinking Burkett's ale." 

Hartley Coleridge is, however, the favorite of £he 
people. He was free and familiar, ready, and anxious 
even, to take a glass ; and when he had taken several, 
was full of wit and poetry. A very little man they say 
he was, — thin, short, good for nothing but to drink and 
chat. He lived on the Simpson farm, into which De 
Quincey married, and died there. During his life his 
friends supported him. " He boarded at our house," 
said the innkeeper's daughter, " and I used to rally him 
on his habits ; for he never went to bed and he never 
got up. He seldom saw his bed before daylight, and 
had his breakfast at dinner-time." Another friend and 
admirer said he believed Wordsworth got most of his 
poetry from Coleridge ; for the latter was a great deal 
the smarter. This discerner of spirits was a retired 
innkeeper, and Coleridge often came to his house. He 
was very silent and stupid till he had three or four 
glasses down ; then he was radiant with genius. When 
he was in the fit of composition, and became entangled 
in the web of thought, he would go out in the field and 
run round and round in a ring. " Queer fellows these 
poets are," this man added. And well he might: one 
striding along, rubbing and beating his breast, and mut- 
tering to himself, and another flying round like a top ! 

A touching incident concerning him shall close these 



THE LAKES AND THEIR POETS. 49 

memorabilia. While Mr. Green was standing near his 
grassy mound, he said, in his uncopyable dialect, " I 
never look at that grave but I think of what occurred 
one day at my house. It was a rainy day, and coming 
in, I found Coleridge there. I asked him what brought 
him there, as he lived some mile and a-half away. He 
had come for something to warm him up. I asked if 
he had had anything. " Only a little beer." " Would 'ee 
ioik soora gin ? " " Aa." [They all say aye here, but 
pronounce it aa, as if they had learned it from their 
sheep.] " He drank it up, and called for another glass. 
I gave it him, and he took a little book from his pocket 
for a little daughter of mine, called for pen and ink, and 
wrote these lines." He repeated them from memory, 
and I copied them down. Here they are ; — 

"hartley COLERIDGE TO MART GREEN." 

" My pretty little maid, 
I hope this book will do thee good. 
May you see your God iii the brook, 
And feel him in the wood. 
But ere thou canst spell thy letters. 
Or know what these pretty words mean, 
I may be gone the way of my betters, 
And I, like thee, be green." 

Tears stood in the eyes of his old friend as he repeated 

the lines. He is green in the memory and love of his 

neighbors all through this dale. He was his own enemy 

alone. Inheriting from the opium-eating practice of his 

greater father a fatal appetite, which was cherished by 

the drinking customs of the valley, and especially by his 

irresolute nature and social habits, he unfitted himself 

for the great struggles and duties of life, and wandered 

from house to house, a genius in ruins ; yet, like the 

ruins around him, green and beautiful. Still to the last- 

he fulfilled the prayer that Wordsworth uttered over- 

his childhood, in one of his finest sonnets, carrying 

" a lamb's heart among the full-grown flocks " ; and to 
4 



50 THE LAKES AND THEIR POETS. 

the last there broke forth from him such vivid flashes 
of imagination as show that, with steady culture, he 
could have equalled in fame the great men that sur- 
rounded him. A cross, with a wreath of thorns around 
it, stands at the head of his green home, with this affect- 
ing inscription, " By thy cross and passion, good Lord, 
deliver us." 

"We shall all have to make the same appeal, and can- 
not judge harshly this disrupted soul. Let him sleep 
beside his strong-hearted friend in the most charming 
of all burial spots. No ruined abbey, no gardenized 
cemetery, can compare with this vale. Calm, solemn, 
affectionate, Nature hangs over the graves of two of her 
humblest, heartiest worshippers. It is the perfection of a 
mausoleum, — one that man cannot despoil, nor time 
destroy. The vale they have consecrated shall conse- 
crate them, and pilgrims to their graves shall ever feel 
the mighty and lovely presence of that Nature which 
inspired and ennobled these her ceaseless worshippers. 

It was a delicious evening when I left the vale 
of Grasmere. I climbed the hill that led northward, 
often looking back to catch closing gleams of its ex- 
quisite beauty. The cuckoo sent his soft notes through 
the heavens, and recalled the words, first written here, — 

" O listen, for the vale profound 
Is overflowing with the sound." 

My last glimpse was on a spot that painfully smote 
upon this tender beauty. A huge heap of stones crowned 
the summit of the highway, said to have been cast up by 
Edmund, the Saxon King, on defeating Dunmail, King 
of Cumberland, A. d. 945. It took me back to savage 
times and men, nine hundred years ago. As the eye 
can in a moment look from earth to the stars, so does 
the soul leap through time in the twinkling of an eye. 

Terrible war then had raged here, and the hills and 
heavens had not only seen great-thoughted men looking 



THE LAKES AND THEIR POETS. 51 

up to "the abyss where the everlasting stars abide," but 
wild, wrathful men, wrestling with each other in deadly 
ferocity. Storms had beat upon the mountains and raged 
through the skies. Perhaps the human storm, like the 
elemental ones, was a needful prerequisite to this present 
peace. On this high pass, in the violet hue and the hush 
of a dying day, I reluctantly bade good-bye to Grasmere 
and the region especially appropriated to Wordsworth's 
life and labors. A coach, fortunately approaching, is 
mounted, and I ride along the base of Helvellyn and the 
side of Thiremere, about ten miles, and enter the ancient 
and crowded town of 

KESWICK. 

It is in the broadest valley of the district, looking ex- 
ceedingly beautiful with its mountain border. Here 
Southey lived for nearly fifty years, here he died, and 
here he lies under the lofty Skiddaw. His house, 
square and spacious, is surrounded with trees and 
lawns. Two of the trees in front of the house were 
sent from America, and planted with his own hands. A 
thick grove, a hundred feet deep, covers the east side of 
his house, running down a steep hill to the Greta. At 
its base, near the river, his seat is still shown, where he 
sat in pleasant weather and had his books brought him. 
The mountains sprang up close to the bank opposite, but 
the scholar dwelt more upon his books than upon the trees, 
waters, and mountains, and here " Wesley," " Nelson," 
and other well-told tales in prose and verse were sketched 
or elaborated. He made far less impression on his 
neighbors than his less scholarly friends had on theirs. 
Though he lived here over forty years, he was scarcely 
known to the villagers of Keswick. They tell me that 
he used to walk daily through their streets, a tall, 
pale, thin man, with his face always looking up, so that 
they wondered that he did not stumble. He wore 



52 THE LAKES AND THEIR POETS. 

wooden clogs often, like the villagers. He was a pure 
student, and Nature, as if in revenge for his neglect, 
brought him back to second childhood ; so that, in the 
last year of his life, the only thing that seemed to inter- 
est him was playing marbles. 

Not far off is the country churchyard, where he 
sleeps in a plain marble tomb, while inside the church 
a marble statue keeps him in memory. 

Twelve miles from Keswick is Cockermouth, the 
birthplace of Wordsworth. Having followed him so far 
I thought it no more than right to follow him unto the 
end, for the beginning was the end to him. The child 
is father of the man ; so I would see what childhood's 
scenery had to do with manhood's verse. My walk was 
on the usual perfection of British roads through the 
usual perfection of British landscapes, increased in this 
instance by the lofty range of the Skiddaw that skirted 
the east, and like tall towers on the west. For four 
miles Bassenthwait, one of the finest of the lakes, 
accompanied me. Thick native woods, through which 
the road passed for miles, gave an additional and almost 
an American bea'uty to the scenery. 

One American feature was wanting : the peril of 
the game from vagrant guns. Rabbits ran across the 
road as fearlessly as boys. Law protects them more 
than it does boys. But yesterday I read in the papers 
how a lad of six or eight summers, living on the edge 
of one of these great forests, was sent to jail for six 
months for trapping a single rabbit. So rigidly do these 
lordlings keep the land and its wild tenantry for their 
own pride and pleasure. 

A carrier finally gave me a " lift," and I entered Cock- 
ermouth on a bag of potatoes in an open cart. Nobody 
seemed affronted at my style. In all probability, the 
Poet-Laureate had often helped himself home after this 
humble fashion. Certainly his hero, the Peddler, whom 



THE LAKES AND THEIR POETS. 53 

I professed to imitate, would have gladly availed him- 
self of such a favor. We exchanged knowledges to our 
mutual pleasure and profit. At sunset, unladen from the 
carrier's cart, I entered 

COCKERMOUTH, 

a large town near the Western Ocean. A great castle, 
built by a follower of William the Conqueror, and dis- 
mantled by Oliver Cromwell, stands at its entrance. 
Rooks flew around it in great clouds, and dark steps 
opened in its massive walls, stopping a few stairs down 
and plunging the victims into awful abysses. It was yet 
partially occupied, though we should imagine that every 
chamber would be haunted by the screaming rooks and 
blacker and noisier memories. 

A broad street runs through the place, on which, in a 
plain stone house of fair proportions, Wordsworth was 
born. Narrow and miserable alleys run into this avenue, 
and gin-shops by scores deface it. But the Derwent 
flows gently behind the town, hills lift themselves green 
and graceful above it, while below it rise the dark moun- 
tains that enclose Buttermere. His life began at the 
beginning of the Lake District, and ended near its end. 
It. was an approja-iate beginning, and one could easily see 
that means of the spirit's culture were afforded in the 
surroundings and supernals of the odd old town. A 
memorial window in the church here preserves his mem- 
ory ; so does a strange son of his, who lives a little out 
of the town, and visits it frequently in that peculiarly 
English and servile carriage, — a chaise drawn by a 
man. It is something like the high-backed car of a 
sick child. In it sits the " full-blown cabbage rose " of a 
duchess, or the equally obese gentlemen, while the 
white slave tugs in his beastly harness. The smooth 
roads give some color to the degradation, though the 
structure of society gives more. A native of Cocker- 



54 THE LAKES AND THEIR POETS. 

moutli, speaking of this custom of Wordsworth's son, 
mentioned another equally queer, perhaps equally Eng- 
lish, act of his. " He is wearing," he said, " his fourth 
wife." This and the man-horse were spoken of incident- 
ally and with no idea of their oddness. Servants and 
wives seem subjected to like humiliations. 

The lake district he has made popular and populous. 
Staring hotels, gaudy and costly mansions, are destroying 
its rurality. But they cannot mar its hills and waters. 
They cannot mar its history. It is a monument of van- 
ished greatness. No man of genius now marries with 
it his higher life. In noisy cities lie Coleridge, Wilson, 
and De Quincey. In a like enclosed vale the wondrous 
Scott; but here their truest and longest friends sleep 
till the earth and heavens be no more. Then shall they 
vanish that seem so stable, and these shall appear incor- 
ruptible who have here crumbled to naught. 

K you dislike Wordsworth, you will this itinerary. 
But if you see in him, among much which was per- 
ishable, much which shall live to the end of time, you 
may be led by it to a reperusal of the most feeling 
ballads of any land, the most profound perception of the 
moral being of Nature and of man. 

This sketch began at Lodore, within hearing of 
Southey's waterfall, and in sight of St. Herbert's green 
island, whence he fled to heaven eleven hundred years 
ago, is finished close by Epworth Rectory, where he passed 
his early years, whose life Southey sought to delineate, 
and who carried far forward toward its consummation the 
holy work of which St. Herbert assisted in laying the 
foundations. So, having proved its unity in one respect, 
if in no other, it shall be called done. 




IV. 



HAUNTS AND HOMES OF BURNS. 




HE most bemarbled poet in Great Britain is 
Burns. This is probably owing to the fact 
that he was a Scotchman, and that he gave 
their local and vanishing vernacular a poetic and public 
habitation and a name. No English poet has done that 
for his equally numerous and lowly dialects. Words- 
worth, with all his treatment of homely and familiar 
subjects, ever handled them condescendingly and as a 
university scholar. Had he had the genius or the pluck 
to have done one thing more, written his ballads in the 
language of Cumberland and Westmoreland, and with 
the gusto with which the natives rattle away in their 
unknown tongue, he might have been as popular as 
Burns. But he shrank from the humble dialect service, 
and the great heart of the world shrinks from him. 

This fact is equally true of all great English writers. 
Not one of them has ever transplanted the wild flowers 
of her native speech to his elegant pages. It is far 
otherwise with Scotchmen. Hogg, Wilson, Ramsay, 
Scott, and Burns delight to render this service. 

Shakspeare has more of this local flavor about him 
than any other English poet. A book is written show- 
ing what Stratfordisms are in his dramas. No small 
part of his wonderful power and popularity is from this 
faithfulness. But he did not give himself openly to its 
service. It was a clandestine love. He chiefly talked, 



56 HAUNTS AND HOMES OF BURNS. 

as he presumed kings and great men did, in the grand 
style, and his "wood-notes wild" are often lost in the 
high phrases of courtly speech. 

The Scotch love the racy and original language of 
their daily life, and, therefore, admire those who fill it 
with their genius and lift it up before all the world. 
Hence they preeminently love its two preeminent repre- 
sentatives, Scott and Burns. No monument in the world 
to a man of genius can compare with the Edinburgh 
memorial in honor of Walter Scott. It probably excels 
in cost, it certainly does in elegance, the combined 
statues and monuments that England has erected to 
her really great men. Most meagre and most mean is 
her expression of gratitude. Most magnificent is Scot- 
land's. But while this single monument outvalues any 
one in honor of Burns, his are more in number and 
second only in cost and elegance. There are no less 
than three memorials, — at Edinburgh, at Dumfries, and 
at Ayr, each far surpassing in beauty and cost any monu- 
ment England has erected to any of her literary sons, 
and the last, like Scott's, outvaluing them all. 

The Burns District is comprised between Ayr and 
Dumfries. They are about sixty miles apart, and both 
lie near the west coast of Scotland. Ayr is a large sea- 
port on that coast, ten or twelve miles below Glasgow. 
Dumfries is close to the border, and about a hundred 
miles north of the Lake District of England. This sec- 
tion is one hundred and fifty miles from Edinburgh, and 
is properly the back country of Scotland. Nearly all 
her historic men and spots were on the eastern coast. 
Though the region had not been without the presence of 
Wallace and Bruce, still their great achievements and 
seats of power were not here. And all its poets and 
litterateurs had flourished around its capitals of Stirling 
and Edinburgh. Glasgow was then an inconsiderable 
town, and with but little influence in that warlike age. 



HAUNTS AND HOMES OF BURNS. 57 

It has but little, even now, in comparison with its less 
wealthy and less populous rival. 

Burns had, therefore, all this western border of low- 
land Scotia to himself. He was its first-fruits, the be- 
ginning of its unsuspected strength. In his delightful 
letter to William Simpson, he dwells on the previous 
obscurity of his native region : — 

" No poet thouglit her worth his while 
To set her name in measured style ; 
She lay like some unken'd of isle, 

Beside New Holland, 
Or where wild-meeting oceans boil, 

By south Magellan. 

" Ramsay an' famous Fergusson 
Gie'd Forth an' Tay a lift aboon; 
Yarrow an' Tweed to monie a tune 
Ower Scotland rings, 
While Irwin, Lugar, Ayr, an' Doon, 
Naebody sings." 

The proper way to visit this district is to go to Glas- 
gow first and then move southward. Every step but one 
in his life journey was in that direction. That one 
was the short time his father spent at Irving, trying to 
get the living by weaving which farming had failed to 
afford, and where he died in the extremity of poverty 
and distress while Burns was yet a youth. This town is 
a few miles north of Ayr, on the road to Glasgow. It is 
not connected with his earliest or his public life, and 
hence has but slight interest to the tourist. As we 
entered the district from the south, we must reverse the 
natural order, go backward from the end to the be- 
ginning. 

To one coming from Liverpool or the lakes, the last 
and most southern of his homes is first reached. Let us 
take the train at Carlisle, 'a town on the west coast of 
England, known in the border wars for its cathedral, 
which is but poorly cared for, and for Archdeacon Paley, 
who lies in it. 



58 HAUNTS AND HOMES OF BURNS. 

We soon pass Gretna Green, where the accommo- 
dating blacksmith forged so many silken fetters, which 
wore longer and were often heavier than the iron ones 
he legitimately wrought. It is a pleasant country spot, 
and one's heart contends with his judgment in favor of 
the lovers here irregularly united ; especially when he 
sees the unchristian spirit in which these divinest of 
human relations is yet subjected here to the cruel con- 
siderations of mere pride and pelf. 

DUMFRIES. 

A ride of forty miles lands me in the lively town of 
Dumfries. Its narrow streets are full of people, among 
whom I twist my way on curious thoughts intent. One 
is soon aware that he has struck the Burns District. 
Pictures of his face, haunts, and monuments, fill the 
shop windows, and the least inquiry about him brings 
forth ready and intelligent responses. 

The points of interest here are the church and his 
monument, the house where he lived and died, the tavern 
that he frequented, and the banks of the Nith, where 
some of his chief poems were composed. 

I came to the tavern first, as undoubtedly Burns 
did. So far my steps and his agree. It is " The Globe," 
and is a little, low, brown, two-storied house, in a narrow 
alley, hardly wide enough for a cart. In one corner of 
a small dark room a wreath is painted on the wall, with 
" Burns's Corner " inside of the laurel. Here he got 
" fou' " too often. Here others get " fou' " yet ; for 
whiskey, the bane of the land, flourishes here still, 
though the genius that once lived for a moment in 
spite of its power has long since vanished from the 
place. 

On the windows here and up-stairs they show verses 
scratched and signed by him, and I presume they are 
authentic. They have his spirit in them. They sing the 



HAUNTS AND HOMES OF BURNS. 59 

praises of women and whiskey, — a queer conjunction, 
but one which he often makes. The best of them have 
those touches of gentleness and of nature by which he so 
often makes us forget his sins in the exquisite tenderness 
with which God had so richly endowed him. Here is 
one, scratched down in an hour when the fumes broke 
away from his brain and left it simple and natural : — 

" 0, lovely Polly Stewart ! 
0, charming Polly Stewart! 
There's not a flower that blooms in May 
That's half as fair as thou art." 

A short but most crooked pebble-paved street leads 
to the house in or near which he lived most of his days ; 
where he died, and where his widow lived till within a 
few years. It was near the corner of a little triangle, 
shut in with dirty plastered houses, at the beginning of a 
slight ascent. This house was slightly superior in its 
appearance to its neighbors, which were of the most 
miserable character, and in the like of which he passed 
all his days. It had a bit of a parlor, and over it a small 
chamber, where he died. It was comfortably fitted up, 
and one could hardly recall the painful hour of his 
departure. If the chamber where the good man meets 
his fate is privileged above the common walks of life, 
that whence a conscience-stricken sinner flies has some- 
thing terrible about it. I could only see that wasted, 
suffering, agonizing son of genius, of Christianity, and of 
sin. I talked with his neighbors, and some who had 
seen him and knew his friends. They thought he died 
penitent and trusting in Christ. It is certain that he 
was very earnest in prayer, and God, who is rich in 
mercy, and who is able to save to the uttermost, and 
casts not away any that come to him through Christ, 
heard an honest cry, we may believe, and, hearing, 
answered and saved. 

From it we wound our way up the hill a few rods, 



60 HAUNTS AND HOMES OF BURNS.' 

and turned into a comparatively broad and straight street, 
being, perhaps, forty feet wide, and ascended a short dis- 
tance to the kirk-yard gate. We followed thus the way 
he had, with his family, occasionally walked to the church, 
and over which his body passed to its long home. It was 
not five minutes' distance from his house. The old church 
and its yard are just as they were in his days, — that, a 
square and homely, yet, in intent and cost, a stylish build- 
ing ; the yard, of two or three acres, full of tall, staring, 
monumental slabs, that " stun " you with their size and 
" spread-eagle " style. In the farthest corner behind the 
church is his last home. It is a granite pile, with pillars 
and dome, three sides open to sight, though covered with 
thick glass, and the fourth having a marble slab, with 
figures in life-size, of Burns as the ploughboy, and the 
genius of Poesy casting her mantle over him. Inside 
of the church they show you the pew where he was sit- 
ting when he saw the lady's bonnet, with its unseemly 
adorning, and instantly composed the address that ends 
with the more well-known lines, — 

" wad some power the giilie gie us 
To see oursel's as ithers see us ! " 

The pew is like all the rest, square, high, unpainted, old. 
It is close to the door, and behind a huge pillar that 
shuts out the preacher. The lady sat in the one just 
before it, and the want of seeing the minister may have 
directed his attention to the Hvelier object nearer.' The 
position of this pew showed at a glance the habits of 
Burns. Wordsworth's pews are close to the pulpit. It 
stands in the corner of the one at Rydal. Burns's pew 
is as near the door as possible, and looks as if he had no 
regular seat, but only happened there for the nonce, out 
of weariness, passion, curiosity, or in a fit of conscience. 
And his exercise there showed that he carried away the 
habit that he brought. 

To see the best of him at Dumfries, one must get 



HAUNTS AND HOMES OF BURNS. 61 

away from his drinking tavern and irreverent pew into 
the fields about the town. The Nith flows through it. 
On its banks some of his finest pieces were composed. 
I walked out three or four miles, and saw the spot 
near the bank where the ride of " Tarn O'Shanter " came 
into his brain. It was close to the river, on a high bank, 
lined with a hedge and a footpath. He was wild with 
excitement, rushed home, put it on paper, and declared 
he had then given birth to his greatest poem. " To Mary 
in Heaven," a far diviner strain, was also composed here. 
Such contraries dwelt in him. 

A pleasant stream this is, of fair width, lined with trees 
and hills, with the land swelling to quite an elevation 
in the near horizon. An old abbey, with its mournful 
rums, stands on a knoll overlooking the river. The 
whole air is full of history. Bruce, Wallace, Douglas, 
Montrose, have been here. The heroines of the " Heart 
of Mid Lothian " dwelt here ; and last, and far from 
least, the Country Parson had his rectory close under 
yon western hills, and drew hence much of the racy 
and gracious influence that flows from his pen. The 
site of the cottage of Jeanie and Effie Deans was pointed 
out to me by one who said he had guided Scott to the 
spot. It was in a little dell, under a tuft of woods, and 
beside a murmuring brook, — a delicious spot for heroines 
to snuggle in. Only I fear its excellencies were less 
fictitious than theirs. For I heard that Effie was a 
disreputable character, suspected of the crime for which 
she was acquitted, by the people of Dumfries, and in her 
character confirming their suspicions. She lived to a 
bad old age, a water-carrier of the city, a profane and 
dissolute old woman. Let us hope that Jeanie was more 
faithful to her character and to the beauty of the spot, 
where she passed her girlish days. 

We can give no idea of the landscape. It is rich and 
quiet, full to the brim of life and of ease, — too rich, too 



62 HAUNTS AND HOMES OF BURNS. 

quiet, when we see the miserable huts of the poor peep- 
ing out here and there, and know that their occupants 
earn hardly a shilling a day, and that irregularly. Yet, 
for purposes of poetry, nothing could be j&ner. The 
river here, as everywhere else in this country, strikingly 
exemplifies the words of Addison, — 

" And wandering rivers, soft and slow, 
Adown the verdant landscape flow." 

A queer old Scotchman, more than seventy years old, 
but brisk as a boy, was our cicerone round the city, — 
full of learning, politeness, loquaciousness, pious words 
and professions, and greed of filthy lucre. He had been 
a schoolmaster, had often seen Burns when a lad, knew 
his wife well, told us all about himself and everybody and 
everything besides, in that hour's walk. He said Burns 
was less than middle height, broad across the shoulders, 
broad, high forehead; he was pale and wasted most of 
the time that he knew him ; Mrs. Burns was slim and 
graceful, with a brilliant black eye, and very handsome 
foot and hand. It was a high compliment she paid to 
any one for her to offer her hand. 

He was full of proverbs. In confessing to his estate 
as a bachelor, he said, " I have n't tried all the fords of 
the Clyde ; " meaning that his condition was not entirely 
compulsory. For he afterward told how his betrothed 
was drowned, and how he had kept faithful to his youth- 
ful love and vows. In describing his neglect by some 
wealthy and high-born relatives, and its effect on him, he 
said, " There are more ways of killing a dog than chok- 
ing him with pudding," — a proverb that shows the rich 
vein of humor that runs through the Scottish mind. 

He said Burns could only compose when half drunk, 
and when alone ; and then his verses sprung up in him 
like a flash of lightning. In this way, after a drinking 
boat at Lord Kincaid's, " Scots wha hae " was created. 



HAUNTS AND HOMES OF BURNS. 63 

This, if true, was doubtless owing to his dissipated habits ; 
and in it he resembles Butler, and Hartley Coleridge, 
and probably most other men of genius, who are the 
victims of intemperance. 

I left the lively old schoolmaster, who is expecting 
soon a great fortune, and meanwhile cheers his poverty 
with prayers and Yankee pennies, and took the train for 
Mauchline. About six miles south of Dumfries, Ellis- 
land is passed, the place where many of his best poems 
were writtep. It is the farm to wliich he removed after 
his marriage, and where he dwelt in toil and poverty for 
several years till he secured the post of exciseman and 
removed to Dumfries. It was the same quiet, undula- 
ting, pleasant landscape that one sees everywhere on this 
island except in its hilly sections ; very beautiful to the 
eye in May, but hard to live upon with its heavy taxes 
and far heavier rents. 

Fifty miles north is 

MAUCHLINE. 

Here his genius first burst forth, and here its freshest 
blossoms and memorials are still found. Mauchline is on 
the railroad from Dumfries to Glasgow. It is the most 
disagreeable and dirty town I have been in, — a half 
dozen narrow, dirty streets, built close with clay biggins, 
and filled with unattractive faces. Still one finds good in 
everything, and I stumbled on it in Mauchline. I fell in 
with a native whose wife was a niece of Jean Armour, the 
wife of Burns, and so had an opportunity, in making her 
acquaintance, of reviving that picture of his life close by 
the spot where she lived, and in a cottage he must have 
often passed, if not entered. For this was on the street 
that led from the house where she was living to Mossgiel, 
and so must have been passed by him whenever he escaped 
from his lonely home to the coarse and dangerous de- 
lights of the dram-shop and the hamlet. I was invited 



64 HAUNTS AND HOMES OF BURNS. 

into the house, or room, I should say. Portraits of 
Burns and his brothers were on the humble walls. The 
mistress received me as cordially and gracefully as if she 
dwelt in sumptuousness. She was a dark-eyed and 
comely lady, and strikingly resembled the pictures of her 
aunt. They showed me a piece of the leg of the bed 
stead on which Burns died. This was all the relic they 
had of their great relative. But the room was to me 
a relic. It vividly revealed the life of the poor peasant, 
though it was undoubtedly superior in its comforts to 
those he occupied. Its floor was earth, or rude slabs of 
stone. Two recesses were built into its sides, large 
enough to hold a bed, but not to get around it. There 
was but one way out or in, and that was over the body 
of the front occupant, providing you were not yourself that 
occupant. The floor was without carpet or rug to relieve 
its nakedness. A grate, the universal fireplace, three or 
four chairs, and a table, comprised the equipment of the 
representative family of Mauchline. It showed that the 
greatness of its founder had not, as with most celebrated 
families, enriched his kindred. Far gi^eater than the 
lairds and dukes around, how different his fate ! 

This gentleman, for such were his manners and such 
would be his position 'in America, took me over the 
village. He showed me the one-story thatched cottage 
in which his aunt-in-law lived when Burns made her 
acquaintance ; and a little window with four panes and 
hung on hinges, in the low-roofed attic, was pointed out 
as the wicket, we might say, wicked, gate, through which 
the poet youth crawled in his clandestine visits to his 
betrothed. The house stood at the head of Cowgate, — 
a narrow dirty lane that finds immortahty in his songs. 

Adjoining this cot are the two drinking-houses of Poo- 
sie Nancie and Johnny Dove. The last, under the title 
of Johnny Pigeon, was honored with a stinging epitaph. 
The first is the scene of the " Jolly Beggars." Poosie 



HAUNTS AND HOMES OF BURNS. 65 

Nancie still keeps it, or one like her, — a buxom ma- 
tron, with a shop full of whiskey, which she was deal- 
ing out incessantly. She carried me to the room where 
he locates that rough opera, and showed me the windoAV 
into which — her house projecting over the sidewalk — 
Burns, looking and seeing the beggars over their jolli- 
fication, conceived the characteristic cantata. For a 
rarity, I will record that she was the only person I met 
in Britain who refused a fee for her services, and that, 
too, when I did not patronize her whiskey. Gavin 
Hamilton's house is still standing. It is a genteel resi- 
dence; not grand, according to our standard, but far 
above the level of the country folk about. Here Burns 
was married by his best and warmest friend. The 
church is replaced by a new and handsome structure, the 
chief eflfect of whose beauty is to make the village look 
meaner and uglier. Let us get away from the painful 
sights and more painful memories of this dirty, drunken 
hole, and walk out over the uplands, glowing in the warm 
light of a June sunsetting, to the place where, more than 
all others, his fancy flowered. His relative walks with 
me, whom I easily transform into Burns himself. The 
daisy comes down to the edge of the village, covering 
thick the road-side as a fitting and charming escort to 
the home of its laureate. 

MOSSGIEL. 

Leaving the congregation of whitewashed and dirt- 
washed hovels we enter a broad, pleasant road that slopes 
upward very gradually for nearly a mile till it leaves us 
on the level brow of a hill, and at the gate of the Moss- 
giel place. A walk of a few rods across an open field 
brings us to the door of a neat and attractive cottage. 
It is somewhat higher, larger, and undoubtedly pleasanter 
than when Robert and Gilbert Burns moved into ^. 
The gentleman who occupies it is a thorough and sue- 

5 



66 HAUNTS AND HOMES OF BURNS. 

cessful farmer. He does what the Bumses could not do, 
makes a living and more out of the farm, though he pays 
a thousand dollars rent for only one hundred acres. His 
wife lost a brother at Bull Run, and so we found our- 
selves at once blood relations. Their hearts are in the 
American struggle, as are those of Scotland generally. 
But the great sorrows of America had here throbbed, 
and they knew and felt as we do, with how great a price 
we were purchasing the freedom of the world. It seems 
fitting that Burns's place should thus be joined to a cause 
he would hold most dear. For he, of all the chief men 
of his time, especially in Britain, was a consistent and 
constant democrat. He felt more keenly than any other 
in this land the galling yoke of caste, and would rejoice, 
if alive, in our success in establishmg the principles that 
he loved, against all enemies at home and abroad. 

It was in and around this house that his first poems 
were written. The vision by which he was called to be 
a poet occurred in that spence, and beside that ingle, or 
fireside. The rooms are after the pattern of the one I 
have described at Mauchline, and easily revive the days 
of auld lang syne. In the field behind the house he 
talked to the daisy. The " wee, modest, crimson-tipp'd 
flower," as I have said, was in full blossom, and I 
dug up some roots from the same field, which I vainly 
hoped to transfer to America. They have shared the 
fate of the flowers he sang. 

In the field on the left of the house he came upon the 
mouse, the "timorous beastie." They are still plenty, 
and had one of them been taken, instead of the daisy, it 
would have probably pleased the tenant as well, and I 
might have had a better chance of getting it home.' 
Under a spreading sycamore, close to the house, he 
often sat and composed verses. The little low-roofed 
a^tic, where he tossed o' nights on his pallet of straw and 
conceived some of his finest pieces ; the kitchen, the barn, 



HAUNTS AND HOMES OF BURNS. 67 

the fields, the high hedge he planted just in front of 
his house, the scenery around, are full of him. The 
landscape looked beautiful in that beautiful hour. It 
rolled oflp very gradually on every side, and then sloped 
up into high hills on the north and south. To the south 
lies Mauchline, whither he nightly went, lured by the 
drinking fascinations that yet everywhere and most pow- 
erfully prevail. On our right, down in the valley, you see 

" The banks, and braes, and streams around 
The Castle of Montgomery." 

On the opposite side are the fields and woods where the 
lass of Ballochmyle blossomed. To her he addressed 
some of his best verses, and sent her a copy. But she, 
with the true custom of the country, despised the plough- 
man's verse as she did his person, and not till he became 
famous did she let it be known that he had ever conde- 
scended to honor her with his song. Yet her beauty, 
and her memory even, live only in this rustic's verse. 

Leaving this pleasant seat, passing the beggar's bush 
opposite the gate, — an old hawthorn which he introduces 
into his songs, — we retrace our steps to Mauchline, and 
take up the line of march for Ayr, eleven miles distant. 
I should have staid at Mauchline, but the town was 
so unprepossessing that a whole Sunday spent there 
seemed as if lost. And then the memories of him there, 
especially those connected with the church, are most 
painful. At Ayr I can attend the church which he fre- 
quented in his Christian and innocent childhood. There, 
too, the " Cotter's Saturday Night " was experienced 
by him, though the poem was written at the Mossgiel 
farm, after " the saint, the husband, and the father " had 
rested from his labors and his prayers. So to Ayr will 
I go. No conveyance being feasible, I took my staff 
and travelled on. The first three miles was the finest 
walk I have seen in this country, except, perhaps, that 



68 HAUNTS AND HOMES OF BURNS. 

around Bassenthwait Lake, on the road from Keswick to 
Cockermouth. Not the famous one from Coventry to 
Warwick, nor the three miles as famous through Wind- 
sor Forest are superior. High trees line the road. Their 
canopy is over you all the way. Fields and vistas rav- 
ish you, and the stillness is perfect. It is down hill al- 
most the whole distance. At its foot, on rising ground, 
stands the Castle of Montgomery, in great parks roUing 
and grand. Down this hiU, either by the street or across 
the fields. Burns used to come. Here the plaintive 
scenes connected with his love for Highland Mary tran- 
spired. The hawthorn yet stands where their last meet- 
ing occurred. It would be pleasant to recall these, did 
not his vows then made to Jean Armour upon yonder 
hill conflict with them. And we have to dismiss him 
from our thoughts as a poor sinner, and think of the fair 
maidens who, ignorant each of the vows the other cher- 
ished, enjoyed the thought that the brilliant and beauti- 
ful youth of Mossgiel farm was all their own. 

But this hill has the other half of the Burns's life 
stamped upon it. It is the very one celebrated in his 
" Death and Dr. Hornbook," across whose ditches, hill- 
ocks, and " stanes " he with difficulty steered himself, and 
at whose base he met and sat and chatted with the 
" Something " who called himself Death. How easily 
we see the jolly drunkard, — 

" I was come round about the hill, 
And toddlin down on Willie's mill, 
Setting my staff wi' a' my skill 

To keep me sicker ; 
The' leeward whyles against my will 

I took a bicker." 

The other party did not reveal himself here, but his 
favorite minister and forerunner, the dram-shop, did : 
the very servant of Death that brought this son of 
genius to his arms, or ere his early prime had gone ; not 
then with the leering bravado of this hour, nor with the 



HAUNTS AND HOMES OF BURNS. 69 

strength and serenity of the Christian, but in terror and 
agony of soul. 

I had been told at Mauchline that I could get a bed 
opposite the gate of the castle park. But calling at the 
wayside inn, I found the old ladies only provided whis- 
key and chairs for theu* guests. They probably sup- 
posed the first would soon slip them from the last, and 
they would sleep off its fumes, unmindful that the floor 
was not the softest of couches. A neighbor was there 
drinking, and he offered me a neighborly glass. Had we 
got fou' thegither, Burns's experience might have been 
completely reproduced. I resisted the fascination and 
entreated for a bed. 'T was no use. They had none to 
let. So I had to trudge on. Eight miles after mid- 
night are longer than thrice that number in mid-day. 
The country covered itself with its black and gray blan- 
kets, and went to sleep. The distant lights on the west- 
ern coast were the • only living things. Their eyes 
twinkled through the darkness as friendlily to me as to 
the sailors on their opposite sides. I tried to follow Na- 
ture, and, stretched in soldier's guise, thought I could 
easily revive the experiences of the camp, where a blan- 
ket and a shelving bank were as sumptuous a couch as 
the most epicurean sluggard could ask. But the hour 
and place seemed hostile to all such modes of relief. 
The air blew cool and damp. The earth, instead of 
soothing, roused the soul with nervous excitements, and 
I had all the disagreeable effects of the proffered cup 
without its momentary pleasure. 

There is no way but to go ahead. So I toil on, meet- 
ing occasional batches of boys, who trolled their songs 
and seemed unmindful of midnight or weariness. I 
thought how often had young Robin tramped this road at 
these hours, half-drunken and rapturously happy, singing 
his own songs to the applauding comrades. And how 
often he had paced them weary, sick and sad, bitterly 



70 HAUNTS AND HOMES OF BURNS, 

complaining of his lot, and more bitterly condemning his 
base habits and his criminal conduct ; condemned, alas ! 
only to be instantly indulged at the very first alehouse 
he reaches, and repeated with increasing avidity of sin 
till violated Nature cast him into the grave. 

At three o'clock the ghostly Auld Brig is crossed. He 
seems pleased at the preference I give him over his natty 
junior down below. Strolling up the dawn-brightening 
street, I see the pleasant name of " Temperance Hotel " 
stretched across a comfortable-looking hostelry — betoken- 
ing a better than earthly dawn brightening the ruinous 
convivialities of this region. Mine host is rung up, and 
his bed, soon plunged into, proves a better friend than 
the breezy uplands, and anon transfers me to the haven 
where I would be. 

AYR. 

Refreshed by sleep and a good "breakfast, I turn my 
Sabbath feet to the auld kirk. Its aisles, paved with 
rude slabs of stone, were hardly eighteen inches wide, — 
full narrow for the crinoline of a modem lady. The 
paintless pews were crowded. An ambitious attempt to 
adorn its harmonious ugliness with painted windows, 
only accomplished the undesirable effect of increasing its 
ungainliness. A true John Knox affair it was : large, 
crowded with pews, homely and hearty. Its real adorn- 
ings are its age, its history, and the mellowness which they 
can cast over the plainest features. The services, in 
spite of the gorgeous window, were of the primitive type. 
Hymns, horrible in rhythm, were sung to tunes equally 
horrible in melody ; the united voices and fervent air of 
the great congregation alone giving the service of song a 
heavenly harmony. The Scriptures were read by every 
eye, the text picked out by every one for himself^ and 
the references of the preacher in his sermon were also 
looked up by the whole congregation. A good sermon 



HAUNTS AND HOMES OF BURNS. 71 

was preached on faith and works, showing their essential 
relation, and hence quite apologetic, though very liberal 
in its theology and spirit. Such a sermon in Burns's 
day would have secured the speedy expulsion of its 
preacher. It was in this church that the bright and 
comely lad regularly worshipped till his eighth year. 
Many a happy memory, with some tedious services not 
so happy, joins him to the place. In the graveyard 
about lie not a few who will live in his verse forever. 

The next day I closed my three days in the Burns 
District by a visit to the memorable spots of the town and 
vicinage. Here are the " Twa Brigs of Ayr," the cause of 
one of the most vigorous of his poems, and the father 
of that equally vigorous child, Russell Lowell's " Bunker 
HiU and Concord Bridge." They are yet as in his days : 
one very old, quaint, and narrow ; the other broad and 
handsomely adorned with statues. The last has not yet 
suffered the fate which the scorned Auld Brig prophe- 
sied should befall it, but seems destined to endure for 
ages. 

On the street leading out to AUoway Kirk is a little 
inn, called " Tam O'Shanter's Inn," to which I have re- 
ferred before. Here the heroes of the tale are said to 
have often foregathered, and hence Tam started on his 
luckless ride. It is a two-storied, four-roomed, thatched- 
roofed concern, — like most of the inns of Scotland. A 
huge picture over the door portrays Tam leaving in the 
dark night on his journey to his farm twelve miles off. 
He is taking the stirrup-cup, — the last dram, drank after 
he is in the saddle. Its rooms are full of memorials of 
these drunken heroes of imagination, and whiskey and 
stirrup-cups yet abound there. It was a pleasure to take 
a cup of coffee in the convivial room, and through this 
better than whiskey, to get anear the heart of that sport- 
fulness and wit. Following the steps of the reckless smug- 
gler, for so he is said to have been, I came in half an hour 



72 HAUNTS AND HOMES OF BURNS. 

to what he passed unmindful, but that which chiefly draws 
me hither, — the little hut where Burns was born. It is 
kept in a good whitewashed state, and is greatly enlarged 
and extended in the rear. But the old and original por- 
tion yet remains : a single room, with rough stones laid 
very unevenly on the floor; an old grate, a dresser, 
two small windows opposite each other ; one put in by 
William Burns, his father, and only about a foot square. 
Here they lived and suffered. In the corner near the 
street he was bom, and that very night a cold January 
storm broke in the clay wall beside his bed. 

" A blast o' Janwar' win' 
Blew hansel in on Robin." 

The slaves have had hardly worse fate ; in fact, con- 
sidering the climate, not so bad a fate as this peasantry 
were it not for one thing, which includes everything. 
William Burns and Agnes, his wife, could not be sep- 
arated. Robin could not be sold from his mother. His 
hut was his castle, as strong to protect him as Stirling 
or Windsor. Ah, yes ! poverty and the proud man's 
scorn are something ; but a perpetual home and the cot- 
ter's Saturday night, — 

" Wbich a' his weary, carking cares beguile, 
An' make him quite forget his labor and his toil, — " 

these were not the blessed comforts of a slave's cabin. It 
is time, however, that this land should bestir itself, and go 
on to perfection from the grand foundation and only true 
corner-stone of human society which she has laid so well 
and so long, — the right of every man to himself, to his 
family, to his labor. Equality, fraternity must be built 
on this before the perfect state is formed. The ruling 
classes must see and do this great work, or the people 
will do it for themselves. The slaves will get their 
rights first, but this peasantry will soon follow. But I 
am talking like, not of, Burns. Let me return. 



HAUNTS AND HOMES OF BURNS. 73 

I leave the house, which is, like almost every other 
connected with him, a rum-shop, that gives one painful 
reminders of the worst phases in his character, and help 
to make many like him in these habits. Descending a 
little hill and going up the opposite side, half a mile off, 
I reach Alloway Kirk, the scene of the famous dance of 
the witches. It is a little thing, — twenty feet by thirty 
or forty, — unroofed, its walls held together by iron bars ; 
a very cheap and plain affair. It was an abandoned 
and haunted kirk in his day. Yet around it sleep the 
unhaunted dead, his father and mother among them. 
Kight opposite a very comely church is being built, and 
near it are the splendid grounds and monuments that 
commemorate the poet. A garden of exquisite beauty, 
full of flowers and shrubs, surrounded by high hedges 
and iron fences, encloses a costly monument. On a high 
granite base stands an open temple with nine pillars, 
representing the nine Muses, crowned with a dome and 
ornamented with statues and busts. Close at your feet 
glides the Bonny Doon, and the old bridge which saved 
Tarn is only a few rods from you. His perilous ride 
was but for a moment, though in that, as in most vital 
moments, was crowded a lifetime of experience. How 
fresh and fair the banks and braes of Bonnie Doon were 
blooming ! As I leaned over the side of the old bridge, 
and gazed upon them sloping up from the river, covered 
with the heavy richness of summer verdure, with culti- 
vated fields and still woods sleeping all around, I thought 
I had seen nothing so beautiful. And to this reviewing 
hour, when the picture hangs in a much larger and 
grander collection on the walls of my memory than it 
did then, I still oft turn to it as the express image of 
the beauty that blushes unseen ; retired, remote, hiding 
itself in its own loveliness, with that sweet sadness whose 
melancholy grace gives perfection to the face of nature 
no less than of man. With him she fell, and with him she 



74 HAUNTS AND HOMES OF BURNS. 

remembers her lost and sighs for her coming Eden. Tarn 
and his pursuing witch are forgotten, and the sad-hearted 
youth wandering here is the centre and life of the scene. 
I hear his plaintive moan and easily make it my own : — 

" Ye banks and braes o' bonnie Doon, 
How can ye bloom sae fresh and fair : 
How can ye chant, ye little birds, 
And I sae weary, fu' o' care ! 
; Thou 'It break my heart, thou warbling bu'd, 

That wantons thro' the flowering thorn : 
Thou mind'st me o' departed joys, 
Departed never to return." ' 

With lingering steps and slow, the spot is. left. The 
low-hung clouds close thicker around, as if bringing the 
scenery and soul into a yet closer affinity than they were 
when he wandered here, and their tears fall thick and 
fast upon the responsive earth and more responsive man. 

A walk in the rain back to Ayr, a ride on the rail- 
road past Irving, his second and last parental home, and 
ttie Homes and Haunts of Burns are left forever. No, 
not forever, — 

" For oft in lonely rooms and 'mid the din 
Of towns and cities shall I owe to them 
In hours of weariness sensations sweet. 
Felt in the blood and felt along the heart, 
And passing even into the purer mind 
With tranquil restoration." 

Three evils, into which, in a sense. Burns was bom, 
helped to pervert what might have otherwise been a 
perfect life of wonderful beauty. They were social caste, 
drinking habits, and the extreme dogmas of faith that 
then prevailed. By the first he was crushed ; by the 
second, corrupted ; and by the third, not saved, but driven 
first to ridicule, and then, having no wise guides and 
ministers, to despair. 

Everybody drank. With inconsiderable and powerless 
exceptions, everybody drinks to-day. Total abstinence 
is growing, and temperance hotels and societies are mul- 
tiplying. Yet whiskey is more common than tea, and 



HAUNTS AND HOMES OF BURNS. 75 

Christians, scrupulous as to cooking or reading on the 
Sabbath, go to bed drunk with permitted toddy. If so 
now, how much more so then. The fine-strung boy was 
cast into this lake of fire. No. wonder those delicate 
tissues caught the flame and were so soon consumed. 

But society crushed his manhood. It is enough to ruin, 
almost, a high-souled man to-day in Britain, if he is low- 
born according to the laws of society. Burns was a 
democrat before Jefferson and Franklin, as soon as Rous- 
seau and Voltaire. He was a bold democrat, singing 
thrilling songs on the equality of man, which even we 
can hardly yet, with a system of wicked caste among us 
and in the midst of our hearts, indorse. His Mauchline 
relative repeated, with a force of expression that cannot 
be conveyed, the stinging lines, — 

"Te see yon birkie ca'd a lord, 

Wha struts and stares and a' that, 
The' hundreds worship at his word 
He 's but a coof for a' that." 

The word coof, for conceit, folly, brainlessness, has no 
match in English, and these birkies and coofs were all 
around him. Close to Mauchline is a magnificent place 
thus occupied to this day. And they and their toadying 
hundreds all " cut " Burns. A friend informed Mr. 
Lockhart that on a fine summer evening he saw Burns 
walking alone on the side of the street in Dumfries, 
while the opposite side was gay with gentlemen and 
ladies, not one of whom would recognize him. He was 
then at the height of his fame, and far superior to these de- 
spisers in talent and attractions. But he was a democrat, 
buying guns and sending them to the French convention, 
and they spurned him. It is not surprising that his unreg- 
ulated nature only plunged the deeper into dissipation. 

And fatalism completed his ruin. Nowhere in lan- 
guage is there such a fearful portraiture of the doctrines 
he had to hear day by day, as in " Holy Willie's Prayer." 



76 HAUNTS AND HOMES OF BURNS. 

We. are shocked at Burns, and call him profane. It is 
true, his spirit is far from right. But was not their letter 
as profane? In his poems he defends the doctrine of 
the New Lights, calling it " curst common-sense " : 

" And that fell cur ca' common sense, 
That bites sae sair." 

Had he been met by it in an experimental form, none of 
the points which goaded him to destruction would have 
pierced him. His prayers and hymns show that he had 
honest and deep religious sympathies. His " Cotter's 
Saturday Night " was wrought out of a much profounder 
nature than his " Tam O'Shanter." And his biographer 
tells how once a comrade, supposed by Burns to be 
asleep, heard him pray in a fearful fulness of distress 
that overwhelmed him. But he revolted at the doctrine 
of unconditional election and reprobation. Feeling his 
spiritual liberty, he was met on every hand by social, civil, 
and religious tyranny, and he fell under their manifold 
power. This is not said to commend or palliate his 
course. He never so defended it. He felt his freedom, 
as well as his sin, before God. But we must remember 
that it is more tolerable in the day of judgment for the 
Sodoms and Gomorrahs than the Capernaums of greater 
light and privilege. And we, who have a free and equal 
society, a public opinion approving of total abstinence, 
and a religion that is based on human liberty no less 
than on the equal, universal potency of divine love, can- 
not shelter our sins under those of Burns. Had he had ^ 
our light, he would have repented long ago in sackcloth \ 
and ashes. He did repent, we hope, unto life eternal. ' 
He will ever be loved for his wide and tender sympa- 
thies, which embraced the despised flower, animal, and 
even insect. Yet more will he ever be loved for his 
grand views of the rights and equality of man. His 
monuments are teachers of the greatest truths and duties. 
Alas ! that they are compelled to warn us to shun his 
sins, while inviting us to emulate his virtues. 




V. 




STIRLING AND EDINBURGH. 

castellated height in Britain equals Stirling 
for majesty and beauty combined. Edinburgh 
Castle is overtopped by Arthur's Seat, that rises 
within a mile of it, and several hundred feet higher. 
Royalty does not show well when uncrowned democ- 
racy stands near it and above it. Windsor Castle 
is a splendid pile of granite, kept up in the best style. 
It stands on a moderate elevation, and has a panorama 
of wide-spreaduig vales and engirting hills, low and 
heavily wooded, rich, but not magnificent. Stirling is 
actually high and hfted up. Imagine a rock some three 
miles in circumference at its base, and a mile and a half 
at its top, shot up from the centre of a plain. Place 
around its base, and partly up its steep sides, an old, 
compact, and lively town. Put on its rough but broad 
top a huge fortress, rising hundreds of feet sheer, and 
towering with sullen pride and confidence over the sub- 
jacent town and region. Fill the courts with soldiers, 
the reminders of the ancient guards of the palace. 
Wander round the deserted rooms, with their regal 
names and bloody history. Stand on the esplanade out- 
side the gate where titled traitors, some, the purest of 
patriots, felt the cord and the axe. Or, escaping from 
this choking memory, cast your eyes downward. To 
the south and west, the valley of the Clyde lies low and 
level, and covered with the richest verdure. Scotland 



78 STIRLING AND EDINBURGH. 

is supposed to be a land of oatmeal and heather, rude 
in climate, soil, and appearance. But it is as rich as 
England, and its mountains give it a stronger and less 
monotonous aspect. You will see no lovelier landscape 
in Europe than that which is beneath you. At this south- 
eastern corner, close up to the castle-walls, is a meadow, 
with a raised circular mound in its centre, a hundred 
feet in circumference, and hexagonal mounds surround- 
ing it. This is the round table of chivalric times, and 
the spot is called the King's Garden. There knights 
used to tilt in armor and think themselves the greatest 
men in the world. How the fashions, as well as the 
men, of this world pass away. Turn north and west, 
and the high hills of Ben Lomond and his kindred lift 
up your vision and your soul. They give the majesty 
that other royal palaces profess but possess not. 

Right before you, to the east, not a mile away, across 
a meadow, springs up a wooded hill. It is not as high 
as the royal one, nor as some untitled ones behind it, but 
it is more historic. Upon it stood Wallace, with his men 
partly below him, partly behind. Ten thousand against 
fifty thousand Englishmen, — an easy prey, the South- 
rons thought. But they fought for liberty, and God 
fought with them. The English were routed, and the 
youngest son of a poor laird became the great man of 
Scotland. On that hill they are now erecting to his 
memory a magnificent monument. But his memory 
needs no monument. All their kings, save Robert the 
Bruce, are forgotten. They are as though they had 
never been. But this name is everywhere revered and 
beloved. " It has been hard work," said a poor man to 
me, " to start this great monument. For Wallace did n't 
belong to the aristocracy." The great families are adopt- 
ing him at last, as the people have from the first. 

Turn a little to the south, and a mile farther off you 
see the second, and better known spot, which sealed 



STIRLING AND EDINBURGH. 79 

the independence that Wallace began. There, on a 
higher and more rolling ground, is the field of 

BANNOCKBURN. 

How closely were Wallace and Bruce associated. 
This battle was within less than twenty years after the 
other, and was dependent upon it. Wallace being en- 
trapped and murdered, the English pride rallied, and a 
second invasion was made. Robert the Bruce led the 
forces of his nation, and, against fearful odds, won a con- 
clusive victory. England was confounded and let Scot- 
land alone. Three hundred years she maintained the inde- 
pendence she then secured, — an independence which she 
yet exercises in many ways, and which was never, in any 
way, surrendered ; for a Scotch king ascended the English 
throne, and in a sense England was annexed to Scotland. 

A walk of three miles brings me to the field. As 
I drew near it, I fell in with a cottager, a very intel- 
ligent man, despite the humility of his condition, and he 
took me to a knoll and showed me the field. On the 
summit of a swell the standard of Scotland was placed. 
The hole in the rock is yet there, and a flag-staff occu- 
pies it. In the valley below glides the little stream, or 
burn, of Bannock. On the lands rising from its opposite 
side were the enemy. On that hill, to the east, sat 
King Edward, expecting an easy victory. His cavalry 
dashed across the stream. But a deep morass on this 
side had been filled with pits and covered, and the strat- 
agem, as old as Abraham, was this time also successful. 
Bruce and Scotland were victors. I saw the site of the 
old church at Ayr, where, the next Sabbath after the 
victory, the Scottish nobles met and unanimously made 
him king, and in Melrose Abbey they show the place 
where his heart is buried. But Bannockburn was fullest 
of him, and I was surprised that on this admirable spot, 
where the standard stood, there is no monument. He 



80 STIRLING AND EDINBURGH. 

at least was not plebeian. It is time that almost six 
hundred years of independence should recognize the 
savior. I was struck with the fact that these two great 
battles were so near each other, and so near the royal 
palace. It shows that other capitals have been besieged 
before ours, and, what did not happen to us, they have 
been captured too. For this castle, at that very time, 
was in the hands of the EngHsh. 

Less than a mile from the field of Bannockburn, and 
in sight of his palace, a king was slain in a civil wai 
with his own son. Wounded, he sought refuge in a 
mill, and called for a priest " I am a priest," exclaims 
an enemy, rushing in and thrusting him through with a 
sword. I visited the mill ; it was deep down in a valley, 
now a miserable hut, and used as a dwelling-house and 
blacksmith shop, — so little attention is paid to it. The 
smith showed me the dirty coal hole where he died ; 
and on learning that I was from America, was very in- 
quisitive as to the war, and very intelligent too. The 
station at Bannockburn has a flower-garden covering the 
steep cut opposite the depot, which is made into a very 
pretty witness of the battle-ground. Growing and glow- 
ing in the greenest of box and the largest of capitals 
are the words " Bannockburn" and " Bruce," and the date 
of the battle. The Lion and the Unicorn are also fiercely 
rampant for the unattainable crown. Is this the pro- 
phetic lion transformed into the grass to which his nature 
is to be assimilated ? 

EDINBUKGH. 

It is fifty miles from Stirling to Edinburgh. This city 
is . admirably situated for poetic, but not for commer- 
cial effect. " Mine own romantic town," Scott calls it. 
But romance has little connection with shipping or 
trading. So Edinburgh, though beautiful for situation, 
is a hard place for omnibuses and trucks, and not espe- 



STIRLING AND EDINBURGH. 81 

cially attractive to ships and • factories. Unhistoric, un- 
comely, and unintellectual Liverpool and Glasgow far 
surpass it in these essential elements of a great town. 

The best place to see the city, and feel it too, is from 
the Scott monument. At the Castle you are too high ; 
at Holyrood, too low. Standing here we shall refuse to 
look at anything else till we have feasted our eyes on 
the monument before us. There is nothing in the Em- 
pire approaching it. Here is a Gothic temple — a hex- 
agonal pillar some twenty feet in diameter and a hundred 
feet in height. It is finished in the highest style of art, 
— every nook and corner wrought into forms of beauty. 
In the centre, under this canopy of covered stone, sits 
the great magician, reading. Around this monument 
are spacious gardens ; in front, a broad, handsome street ; 
on the side, beyond the gardens, are the gallery of art, 
and museum, in fine stone buildings, pillared on every 
side. 

Behind, the ground slopes rapidly down into a deep 
valley, which formerly, and for many centuries, bounded 
the town. At the upper end of the valley, half a mile 
from our post of observation, is the Holyrood Palace. 
It is a very unattractive palace, more so than any 
other in Britain. It is simply a quadrangle, not spacious 
nor splendid, enclosed in but a few acres. Whether 
the kings had become tired of high life and so shel- 
tered themselves here, or whether they became pos- 
sessed of demons and ran violently down the steep 
heights above and were choked in this place, the anti- 
quarian does not inform us. As this last experience 
befell some of them, it may be the true solution of the 
problem. 

Look down into this deep valley just behind the 
monument, and you will see the trains passing and re- 
passing, weaving in and out the modern web of life over 
these dusty centuries. From its gulf the old town rises 
6 



82 STIRLING AND EDINBURGH. 

before you on the opposite side, — the oddest bit of town 
in the kingdom. Sheer over this gulf the buildings 
hang, — climbing up the hill-side ten stories and over. 
At the south corner the hill consummates itself in a very 
precipitous manner, whose sides even the ambitious town- 
builders have shrunk from lining with houses, but whose 
ragged top is fittingly crowned with the towers and 
battlements of the Castle. 

Still keeping our position, we follow with our eye this 
crest from the Castle along the street on which the houses 
face, whose backs, as we have seen, are most decidedly 
up, and which is well termed High Street. You see 
that it gradually descends from the Castle to Holyrood, 
— a mile above, or rather a mile below. 

These are its extremes. Hills rise up steep all around 
Holyrood. On the side towards you, and at the end of 
the street on which the monument stands, is a peak 
called Carlton Hill. It is adorned with monuments to 
Burns, Nelson, Playfair, and others, and looks very hand- 
some and Grecian. On the side beyond and out of the 
town, springs the highest of Edinburgh hills, and a very 
lofty summit for a city. It is Arthur's Seat, and is eight 
hundred and twenty feet high. Behind you, or in front of 
the monument, the modern city lies, first ascending a long 
swell, and then descending far down into the valley that 
borders the Frith of Forth. This part of the town is 
very handsome; broad streets, frequent parks, elegant 
residences, statues, gardens, — everything that city luxury 
and taste can give, — abound here. 

There you have our sketch ; only one or two addenda 
are needed. Cross the bridge that spans this gulf, and 
go up into High Street. It is going up truly. You can 
work your way round if you are a foreigner, but if a 
native, you will disdain such roundabouts as a sailor does 
the lubber's hole. So mount the steps of this alley, — 
how many I know not, — then slide up the smooth in- 



STIRLING AND EDINBURGH. 83 

clined plane which they have disdained to cut into steps, 
and which must be admirable for " coasting," even in sum- 
mer. After due labor you are in Auld Reekie. Near 
by is John Knox's house, an odd pile, with steps up the 
outside to the door in the second floor, with windows of 
every size and every sort of dis-location, each higher 
story projecting over the next lower, affording him a 
fine pulpit, had he chosen so to use it. Above the 
door is a singular inscription for so zealous a soul — 
" Lufe.God.above.all.and.your.nichbour.as.your.self." 

Here, too, is the High Church, where he preached to 
trembling James and Mary, and where Janet flung her 
stool at the imported priest who undertook to read 
prayers in her hearing. I sat in the old pulpit and 
talked with a modern Janet. She was sweeping and 
dusting, preparatory to the annual opening of the Na- 
tional Assembly ; and full of talk she was of America, 
the war. Sir Walter, King James, Knox, and all. 

" We had to keep our religion with the sword," said 
she, " and we would do it again if necessary." 

" So you would throw a stool at a minister who should 
read prayers here, — would you ? " 

" Aye, sir, that I would." 

And she flung her arms about in a way that showed 
that she felt what she said. 

It is an old and not handsome church. They were 
thorough Puritans, and yet retain not a little of the 
ancient feeling. No organs, no paintings, no windows 
richly dight. These last are creeping in, and so are the 
first, and they may yet be as tasty and as vain as their 
Southern neighbors. 

Being in the street, you will see that its houses are 
here of the usual height, and that what we saw from the 
new city is repeated on the other side. It is on a 
narrow ridge, and the farther side is built up like the 
hither. The gorge beyond us is crowded with old 



84 STIRLING AND EDINBURGH. 

houses and young children, all alike dirty and disa- 
greeable. 

Still ascend the street and you shortly reach the 
ancient gate of the Castle. The broad area is lined with 
lounging soldiers. The pierced and battered walls are 
crowned with gay spectators. The laborers' children on 
a holiday excursion run noisily through corridors and 
rooms which once their presence would have defiled. 
Peace and democracy have largely invaded this haughty 
stronghold. Its glories, like most pretentious secrets, 
are of small value when subjected to the glare of 
common day. Queen Mary's room is a small, oak- 
lined chamber, not more than twenty feet square ; it 
looks very simple and cheap. Adjoining is a bedroom 
not ten feet square. Here King James, the uniter of 
England and Scotland, was born. Some pious words 
are placed on the wall over the place where the bed 
stood, whether by him or his mother is not known. Out 
of a little window in the wall he was let down in a 
basket, two hundred and fifty feet, when he was eight 
days old, that he might be carried to Stirling to receive 
Romish Baptism. Mary thought more of his soul than 
of his body that time. Drop a baby out of one of the 
holes in the top of Bunker Hill Monument to the 
bottom, and you have a good idea of the triumph of a 
mother's faith over a mother's love. 

It was this faith that caused all her troubles. Had 
she accepted the religion of her people, she would have 
died in honor and on her throne. But though they 
loved their Queen much, they loved their Church more. 
Her French education clashed with her nation's religion. 
Hence her troubles, sorrows, shames, and sins. No 
beauty of person can make her all beautiful within. 

The finest view of the city and country is from 
Arthur's Seat. A prince went up there once ; and one 
here has to be proud to do what a prince has done ; so 



STIRLING AND EDINBURGH. 85 

we mount the mount. The land h'es before us, full of 
points, historic and scenic. Two thousand years of 
human history — the " syllables of recorded time " — 
are under your eye. The Pentland Hills are just 
across from the Castle. They are named from the 
Picts, or painted savages, like our Indians. They were 
the aborigines, or, at least, the first known men. The 
Scots and they waged their battles here. Then the 
Romans fought the Scots. The walls of Agricola are 
in full sight. Then the Britons, Scots, and Romans 
had a free fight for several generations. Then came the 
Danes, the Anglo-Saxons, the great wars of the English 
and Scotch, the Covenanters and Friars, Cromwell and 
his foes, McGregor and his Highlanders against the 
Lowlanders, and last, Mary and her allies against 
Douglas. The land is like the room where Shakspeare 
was born, covered so thick with inscriptions that they 
obliterate each other. But the inscriptions here are all 
bloody. They made their mark, and the fields have 
flowed with the red lines. Every hill-top has had its 
blazing torches upon it, — its bloody struggles beneath 
it. Ben Lomond and his kindred stand in their hoods 
and robes of mist, as if yet wearing mourning for the 
mourning that for centuries and centuries constantly 
covered the land. It is so with all this island, and yet 
these people talk as flippantly and ignorantly of the im- 
possibility of our healing our wounds and being again a 
united people, as if they had no ancestry and no history. 
They worship their ruins and footsteps, and yet learn 
no lessons from them. 

SOME EDINBURGH CELEBRITIES. 

It was my good fortune to be present at the opening 
of the General Assemblies of the Established and Free 
Churches of Scotland. Edinburgh is a lively town 



86 STIRLING AND EDINBURGH. 

ordinarily, but when the Assembly opens its session she 
puts on her gayest apparel. It is her grand holiday. 
Nothing shows more clearly the religious spirit on which 
she fed and grew than this fact. But the great disrup- 
tion has shorn the day of much of its ancient glory; 
and this year the Queen desired that the usual military 
display be dispensed with, out of respect to the memory 
of Prince Albert. So nothing but a lumbering state- 
coach, with bepowdered and red-coated footmen and 
coachmen, and a score or two of dragoons, fed the eye 
of the populace. 

Apart from this parade, the National Church seemed 
to awaken but little interest. No crowds attended its 
services, no enthusiasm marked them. A very heavy 
preacher and a very dull auditory filled the spot made 
memorable by Janet's stool and Knox's thunderings. 
Their Assembly was equally proper and dull. It was 
enough to suppress the life of a religious body to have a 
layman, representing a merely civil and earthly power, 
sitting in the throne-seat, high and lifted up, while the 
moderator, the recognized spiritual head of the church, 
sits far below, and evidently feels, as well as looks, 
servile. So sat Lord Belhaven, Lord High Commis- 
sioner, and representative of the Crown, above the very 
reverent as well as reverend moderator. 

The Free Church, both from its origin and constitu- 
tion, is a far livelier body. It has twice as many 
churches in this city as the Established Church, and 
judging from the opening scenes we witnessed, it has a 
hundredfold more enthusiasm and popularity. Its great 
Assembly room was crowded, and hundreds could not 
gain entrance. Their moderators were their chief men, 
and they brought forth their best gifts. Dr. Candlish 
was the retiring, Dr. Guthrie the incoming moderator. 
The outgoer preaches a sermon, the incomer makes a 
speech. Dr. Candlish was a short man, thickset, with a 



STIRLING AND EDINBURGH. 87 

mop of long, curlyish gray hair bursting out on all sides 
of his head, as if electricity was passing through it. And 
no doubt much electricity does pass through it when he 
is aroused. He preached on diversity of gifts, but one 
spirit. A skeleton in a book may be as disagreeable as 
one in a closet. So I '11 not set before you the pulpit 
horror. Enough to say that he showed, or said rather, 
that the division made by the Apostle in 1 Cor. xii. 4-6, 
of gifts, service, and operations, referred to the " Persons" 
of the Godhead ; the gifts were of the Holy Ghost, the 
ministry or opportunity of using the gifts from Christ, 
and the using them of God, the Father : a triad of ac- 
tivities corresponding to the triadic nature of God. 
This may be no more than a conceit, but it was wrought 
out with great ability and aptness, and clearly met with 
his own hearty approval. When he spoke of the one 
spirit informing all the Church there, he was evidently 
more than hinting at the condition of the Established 
Church, saying that " pressure from without, and spices 
and drugs of the apothecary within, could not make 
a dead body a Hve one. Swathed in fine linen, filled 
with perfumes, and placed in a costly box of cedar, 
a mummy was yet no man." All felt the allusion and 
enjoyed it. 

The Doctor is the last survivor of the leaders in the 
disruption, and is looked upon with great respect by his 
juniors. He is a man of power, but his address savors 
more of the student than the orator. His manner is 
awkward. He bends his little body over his little 
manuscript, twists his mouth awry, dashes his hand 
through his flying hair, sweeping it away from his fore- 
head in a quick and uneasy manner. His voice is not 
more attractive than his address. His clear and cogent 
thought is his sole weapon. 

Dr. Guthrie is of the opposite school. He is born to 
command a popular assembly. He is a tall, well-built 



88 STIRLING AND EDINBURGH. 

gentleman of about fifty years, with long, flowing, griz- 
zled locks that hang gracefully about his head and 
shoulders. He has a handsome hand, and knows it, 
and knows how to use it. As he stood in Dr. Candlish's 
seat, the contrast was striking. He felt himself master 
of the hour. The wild enthusiasm of his reception 
showed that he was the popular idol. His voice is 
deep, melodious, easy, impressive, the voice of an oratop 
His speech was full of hits at the enemies of the Free 
Church, not malicious, but yet strongly tinctured with 
the enthusiasm that creates and controls enthusiasm. 
Many a time he set the audience in a roar, and cheer 
upon cheer followed some of his allusions to their 
conflicts. 

But his speech was not merely witty. It had not a 
few grains of superior thought. He said the Free 
Church might be the greatest instrument which Provi- 
dence should use for destroying that relation of Church 
and State that exists here, by which the Queen declares 
herself " the supreme governor of the Church." Very 
near to blasphemy is that phrase. Henry the Eighth 
stole the Pope's mitre and put it on his own head, 
instead of destroying it, as he ought to have done. The 
Romanist is a better reasoner than the English Church- 
man. If there is to be any single human head of the 
Church, he ought to be an ecclesiastic. If there is to be 
any subordination, the State should be under the Church, 
not the Church under the State. But the world was not 
made in a day; and the assumptions of Henry broke 
a gigantic tyranny and paved the way for the true 
relation of these high contracting powers, as set forth in 
our institutions. 

This boldness of speech was far above the Doctor's 
courage. Yet the gusto with which he prophesied, and 
the crowd welcomed, the dissolution of a patronizing State 
and a patronized Church, was most healthful and hopeful. 



STIRLING AND EDINBURGH. 89 

A third Edinburgh celebrity, less famous at home 
than these, but more widely and more admiringly known 
in America, is Mr. Boyd, the Country Parson. His 
Recreations have recreated many souls. 

Being lion-hunting, like the Nimrods in Africa, I go 
to the hunting-grounds. Armed only with a card and a 
little Yankee brass, I present myself at his door. He was 
iving in a quiet and delightful part of the new city, in a 
comfortable, spacious, stone house. It was long the 
residence of Prof Ayrtoun. I send in my card, with 
" Boston, U. S. A.," upon it, and am immediately ushered 
into his presence. He very cordially welcomes me, and 
we forget in five minutes that we were ever strangers ; 
at least I did. He was carefully, yet not clerically 
dressed. He speaks more rapidly than is usual in this 
country, as though he had caught our spirit with our ap- 
proval. His face lights up with smiles, and his lips 
run over with humor. Many odd reflections on men 
and things, uttered in a dry manner, as if half uncon- 
scious of them, while thoroughly conscious, give that 
quaintness and vigor to his speech that exist in his 
writings. He is of medium height and size, in the 
neighborhood of forty, ^ — looking under that age. His 
country parsonage, as we have said before, was near 
Dumfries. Very beautiful are the hills and vales of that 
region, — sweet, quiet, pastoral, with forests enough to 
break up the otherwise too high finish of culture. It is 
the very spot for sauntering musings, such as character- 
ize his pen. No city study can compare with it. And 
if he maintains the geniality, freshness, and piquancy of 
his manse in his present home, it will show that the 
roots there planted have struck deep, and that as fine 
trees can grow in a city park as in a country forest. 

With such rising and popular men as Caird and 
Boyd and Talloch in the National Church, it is evident 
that it is not disintegrated by the disruption. The Free 



90 STIRLING AND EDINBURGH, 

Churclimen will have to look to their laurels, or they 
will find the great men that achieved their liberty have 
no successors. Caird is one of the most popular preach- 
ers in Scotland. Boyd may yet be, though if we were 
to judge from his pen alone, he would be too quiet for 
the multitude. That he is not caviare to them, speaks 
well for their good taste. He appreciates the esteem in 
which his writings are held in America, and looks there, 
as every growing British writer already does, and will 
yet more, for the largest field of reward and renown. 



SOME EDINBURGH GRAVES. 

The dead are often more attractive than the living. 
It was so here. Two or three men of might breathe the 
upper air, but more and more mighty are the dwellers 
among the tombs. One does not instantly put Edin- 
burgh and Guthrie, Brown or Boyd, in conjunction, but 
Edinburgh and Scott and Jeffrey and Kit North. We 
praise the dead that are already dead more than the 
living that are yet alive. 

Of the spirits that have ruled and renowned this city 
but few have left their dust in her soil. Grey Friars 
Church-yard, in the romantic dell under the Castle, holds 
the ashes of George Buchanan, Robertson the historian, 
Ramsay and Hugh Blair. No late celebrity sleeps 
there. Two of these, Wilson and Jeffrey, rest in the 
Dean cemetery ; Chalmers and Hugh Miller, in the less 
beautiful Southern cemetery among the meadows. The 
Dean cemetery approaches the best American burial 
places in scenery and artistic adorning. It is perched 
on a hill-top, with steep sides, heavily wooded, going 
down to the watery Leith. Its monuments are tasteful, 
and some of them costly. John Wilson's is a gray shaft 
of Aberdeen granite, with his name and the dates of birth 
and deatii. Here rests the brilliant magazinist, whose 



STIRLING AND EDINBURGH. 91 

dramatic perceptions only Scott and Burns, of his coun- 
trymen, have equalled ; who, first and last of all writers, 
has clothed the dryness of a critic and a political pam- 
phleteer with the gayety and vivacity of a romanticist ; 
whose arrows, though sharp, were never dipped in gall ; 
the great-hearted, roistering youth, the broad-headed, 
bright-witted, rollicking man, the tender, devoted, devo- 
tional sire. His grave should be honored above most 
of his countrymen. It is thus honored. For on it lies 
a little wreath of immortelles, with " A mon pere '* 
inscribed upon it. What great man's grave has such 
an aflfectionate domestic reminiscence? It shows how 
deep and sweet were these home fountains of his soul. 
Not far from him, in a more stately tomb, lies his chief 
rival Jeffrey. A full-blown inscription adorns his monu- 
ment, and wealth and pride were evidently the chief 
mourners. One could not but think that Kit North 
had as far excelled his quick-witted, but narrow-witted 
rival, in the article of his burial, as he had in his judg- 
ment on Wordsworth, or his appreciation and utterance 
of the voices of nature, art, and religion. Yet both dwell 
in harmony together now, as in the heat of their official 
conflicts they probably did under the gray roofs and by 
the gay fires of Auld Reekie. 

Chalmers and Miller are in adjoining plats in the 
level graveyard below the town. A wall ten feet high 
encloses the cemetery. It is emphatically a dead wall. 
Along its face are set great staring tablets, stretching 
from the top to the bottom, recording the extraordinary 
virtues of the sleepers below. At the lower end of this 
walk, we pause before a smooth green lawn some fifteen 
feet in width. Looking on the staring bills placarded in 
stone upon the brick wall, a familiar name arrests the 
eye. The celebrity for once is worthy of " the spread." 
It describes Thomas Chalmers with a fulness and ful- 
someness unbecoming so great a man. One whom 



92 STIRLING AND EDINBURGH. 

nobody knows might well have his biography set forth 
here. Not the great preacher, scholar, and ecclesiastical 
statesman. His name was enough. Beside him sleeps 
his great advocate, whose clerkly pen smote like his stone- 
hammers between the eyes of Established Churchism, and 
broke its ponderous skull ; who also, and almost alone, of 
eminent scientific men, crushed the infidelity that stole 
the armor of science and then defied the higher truths of 
the Living God. A foolishly ornate tablet stands sen- 
tinel over his grave. 

lovers' lane. 

Under a side-wall of the latter cemetery is a narrow 
lane, well shaded and creeping up a slight slope. It is 
called " Lovers' Lane." For generations the lassies and 
laddies have frequented this path, and still it is said, on 
Sabbath nights, it is crowded with bilHng and cooing 
pairs. To pass into its narrow gate and straight w'ay 
is a sort of avowal of betrothal. What an old country 
is this, where such fancies have become solid with age. 
How juvenile our land looks beside this juvenility. 
Youth and mirth and tenderness walk softly in this 
grassy lane. It is sown thick with other loves and youths 
than ours. Lift your eyes firora the object beside you, 
and you can see, not only from the white stones staring 
at you over the wall, but from the crowded generations 
that, before yours, have thrilled with intensest life as 
they first strolled here, that the path of love, no less than 
that of glory, leads but to the grave. 

A LESSON, AND HOVT IT WAS LEARNED. 

Coming thence to our hotel, I almost had an adven- 
ture. It taught me a lesson of British hospitality that 
was novel and somewhat perilous. A broad, luscious 



STIRLING AND EDINBURGH. 93 

field lay between me and " the meadow walk," the favorite 
play-ground for Edinburgh boys. By crossing the field 
I should save a long circuit. A rare break in the high 
wall let me in ; I strike across the field to where the 
boys were at their evening sports, but found the wall on 
the opposite side too high to be scaled. Following it 
down I hoped to find some abatement of its pride, but it 
maintained the even haughtiness of its proprietors, to 
where it ended in the higher wall that enclosed the 
mansion. Disappointed, I turn back to the now far 
distant corner where I had foolishly crept over. A 
herd of matronly-looking kine were grazing near by. 
Out of their company a thick-necked gentleman walks 
slowly towards me. He is the very model in looks and 
airs of his masters, and I see at a glance, in the midst 
of my terror, how appropriate is the name of Bull to a 
Briton. He turns not to the right hand nor to the left. 
It is my turn to turn. For once, to my mortification I 
confess it, a Yankee had to flee from a John Bull. The 
Yankee had no revolver, stone, nor stick. His legs 
were his only weapon, and he properly put them to their 
proper use. A little copse was near, shut from the 
Sultan and his seraglio by a low and movable iron 
fence. He was within forty feet of me before I sus- 
pected his nature or designs, so quiet and cow-like were 
his movements : in this, too, strikingly conforming to the 
national character. I saw by his steady and slightly 
increasing pace, and by the directness of his aim at me, 
that he was not, as Hawthorn says of the bipedic British 
animal, " the Female Bull," but the masculine counter- 
part. I therefore put on his airs, — the best way always 
to subdue a Briton, — and with like outward coolness and 
calmness, though with a somewhat fleeter step, moved 
towards the low fence and protecting copse. He does 
not get sufl&ciently aroused to scale the powerless pro- 
tection, and the Trent affair on the Edinburgh Grange 



94 STIRLING AND EDINBURGH. 

closes, like its prototype in " the still vexed Bermoothes, " 
with no harm to either side. Prince John returns to 
his dames, and I, passing through the woods, come out on 
the other side, cross in safety the long meadows, through 
a flock of noble-blooded sheep, whose lords eye me with 
scorn but refrain from assault, and crawling ignobly out 
of the hole where an hour before I had crawled in, re- 
trace my weary steps, in the evening dark, back to my 
quarters. I learned a lesson that proved useful in all 
my subsequent wanderings through the island, and 
that was, to keep in the old paths. Such a path, if 
through the grandest estates, is as old, as public, and as 
much protected as the highway ; but a single step to 
the right or left is sure to bring one suddenly to grief. 




VI. 



THE FINEST WALK IN ENGLAND. 




COVENTRY. 

WO Englishmen laid a wager as to whicli was 
the finest walk in England. The money depos- 
ited and the judges seated, one declares that it 
is the walk from Stratford to Coventry, the other, that it is 
that from Coventry to Stratford. Which won the case is 
not added. Perhaps the judges are sitting on it yet. The 
quaint old city of royal processions, steeples, and ribbons, 
Godiva and Peeping Tom, still preserves much of its 
ancient looks and ways. The streets are thin lanes ; the 
projecting chambers bob to each other across the paths, 
like decrepid dames with protuberant chins across their 
gossipy table. Peeping Tom stuck out his head from a 
niche at the corner of the chief thoroughfare, and Godiva, 
" clothed o'er with chastity " and with the grosser apparel 
of ordinary dress, moved along the rattling pavements, evi- 
dently not averse to his respectful attentions. From the 
midst of these pinched and crowded alleys spring two 
of the most airy steeples that kiss an English sky. 
The spirit of St. Michael, the patron saint, is breathed 
into those aspirations. Antwerp's is hardly more ma- 
jestic, not more aerial. The silk manufacturers showed 
their taste in these structures no less than in their wares. 
A comely cemetery rolls in graceful undulations, thick 
swarded with perfect grass, and shaded with hardly less 
perfect trees. I learned a peculiarity of British cem- 



96 THE FINEST WALK IN ENGLAND. 

eteries here that reveals either the value of land or the 
straitness of the purse. It is not unusual to buy as a 
family lot one grave. Dig this fifteen feet deep for the 
first occupant, and excavate to his coffin for the second, 
and so on upward. Thus one grave can easily accom- 
modate a family. It is not an unpleasant thought when 
once acclimated. Wordsworth's wife lies thus upon his 
bosom. Prices vary according to the depth first dug and 
according to location, as in the rural yard of Kendall. 

Poverty reigns supreme in Coventry. Think of a 
city of forty thousand inhabitants with sixteen thousand 
paupers. The poor-rates are seven shillings to the pound, 
or thirty-five cents in the dollar. If you pay a rent of 
one hundi'ed dollars, you must add to it thirty-five doUars 
for the poor. This rate is constantly changing, though 
usually on the increase. Well might they long for a new 
Godiva,'who should relieve them of this worst distress 
than any which moved their great ancestress to com- 
passion. St. Mary's Hall, the ancientest dining-hall in 
the realm, has a picture of that event; and this year 
they celebrated it by a procession, a lady in silk tights 
condescending to act her part. It was excused, nov/ as 
then, on the score of the poverty of the people, — the pro- 
cession drawing visitors and money to the town. 

But we came here to go to Stratford, not to melt 
before universal misery, or to see its yet questionable 
modes of relief. 

A lovely morning allured us, soft and cloudy, — the 
perfection of a British day to feast upon the perfection 
of a British landscape. The sun peeped out occasionally, 
like an Oriental beauty in sly glances from behind her veil. 
A broad, smooth road moves out straight from Coventry. 
Ancient elms and sycamores stand for miles beside it, two 
columns deep, with silent parks, and more silent sheep, 
appearing between their pendent boughs. Here and 
there a snug tenant-house broke up the green monotony, 



THE FINEST WALK IN ENGLAND. 97 

and once or twice a larger mansion betokened a small 
freehold thrust into the gorgeous wilderness. But these 
were rare exceptions to the general law. Hardly half 
a dozen owners grasped these wide-rolling acres. Lord 
Leigh rules over fifty square miles, the largest landed 
estate in England. The Earls of Clarendoft and War- 
wick are scarcely inferior monarchs. No wonder Coven- 
try starves when such monopolies devour all neighboring 
lands with their insatiate appetite. Cattle are carefully 
preserved ; men and women as carefully excluded. 

Five miles of such enchanting beauty, and I tread 
the cobble-stones of a short and narrow street, lined 
with moss-roofed cottages and petty taverns. A few 
rods farther and the gateway of 



KENILWORTH 

stands before you. A grand ruin is certainly a grand 
affair, and Kenilworth is the finest in England. It was 
a lordly seat centuries ago, — a royal palace, a seat of 
rival royalty, when civil wars abounded here. It was a 
favorite resting-place of kings and queens till Cromwell 
dismantled it, as he did so many other fortresses. The 
romantic antiquarian waxes wroth over his destructive- 
ness, but the lover of man rejoices in his annihilation of 
towers and temples, which were used only for super- 
stition and tyranny. The castle stands on a lofty eleva- 
tion, commanding a fine sweep of miles. Near the gate 
is a high stone building, used formerly for the keep- 
er's lodge. It is larger and finer than many gentle- 
men's residences here and in America. Passing it, and 
going up a rather steep but very green ascent, I ap- 
proached the ruined towers. They face us on either 
hand. These on the right were built, it is said, in the 
eighth century and before. Yet they are as crumbleless 
as if just erected. They were beheaded, but their trunks 
r 



98 THE FINEST WALK IN ENGLAND. 

remain. It is evident that Cromwell's, not " time's, effac- 
ing fingers " have wrought what ruin they have suffered. 
Conceive of a mass of stone a hundred feet square and 
a hundred feet high, and you have a slight idea of this 
single Csesar's tower. On your left, on a line with this, 
a like but larger mass rises. These are more ruinous, 
run over with ivy, and have, evidently, felt the tooth of 
time. They are the towers of the Earl of Leicester, the 
favorite of Elizabeth. The space between these extremes 
cannot be less than three hundred feet. This is its front, 
— all gone but the extremities, — life here dying at the 
centre first. Before you, but far in, are the halls erected 
by Leicester, very stately in their time, but now far 
advanced toward the dusty state to which they, as well 
as their proud builders, came and returned. Mount a 
ruined pinnacle, and see what makes a palace here. 
Towers and walls, and other structures belonging to the 
building, lie around, which originally, according to Sir 
Walter Scott, covered a space of seven acres. Beyond 
were lakes and parks and gardens, and all manner of 
delights. Cromwell's men drained the lakes, and divided 
the estate into farms. But such an idea as the last could 
not abide here, and back it goes to its old possessor. The 
waters, however, have not returned. Here you can look 
and muse, and see visions and dream dreams of the 
scenes of war and peace, of revelry and piety, of delight 
and distress. For, after all, the chief use of a ruin is in 
what it reveals to the inner, not the outer eye. Nib- 
bling sheep, screeching daws, climbing ivy, waving trees, 
abounding grass, crumbling arches and pillars, windows 
with bits of stone framework, the sole reminders of 
their flashing beauty, as the sightless eye-sockets of the 
skull, horribly testify to the light and glory that has once 
shone there, — these are all as profitless as a valley of 
dry bones, unless the Spirit breathes upon them. And 
our musings cannot be your musings ; so we sketch the 



THE FINEST WALK IN ENGLAND. 99 

skeleton. You must reclothe and reanimate it with 
your own imagination. , It is well that it is destroyed. 
It would be well if every other like fortress, such as 
Warwick and Windsor, were in a like condition. For 
fortresses they all are, and forts, too, which were built 
to defend oppressors against the oppressed, not to defend 
the people against their foes. Every builder of these, 
from the Roman to the Norman, was a tyrant. His poor 
serfs, huddling around his huge walls, fed fat his pride 
and power ; and to-day they call them kings and queens, 
dukes and earls, lords and baronets, and fancy theirs is a 
better blood than the descendants of the victims, the 
present and perpetual tillers, the rightful but impossible 
owners of the soil. Away with such abominable sophis- 
try. England will learn yet that not these noble bloods 
are her noble men ; not those who trace their heritage 
to a thief and a robber, are the real authors or transmit- 
ters of her greatness, but the down-trodden, the despised, 
the long enslaved, and not yet emancipated people. 

Thus we mused as we sat amid these haughty walls, 
and thought of the kings and mighty men that had fought 
or revelled here, and how little of kingliness or true 
mightiness was in all their deeds. Before us lay the 
exquisite landscape. In the days of Leicester and Queen 
Bess, it was a forest full of wild deer. Shakspeare, 
trudging afoot, probably, as I had, from Stratford to Cov- 
entry, had passed through it, and peopled it with the 
fancies of his brain. " As You Like It " has its seat in 
those forests of Arden. The melancholy Jacques, the 
brilliant, affectionate Rosalind, the hearty old gardener 
Adam, the queer, but like all his queer chaps, most keen 
Touchstone, had whatever of local habitation and name 
they ever had, in this region. And so, like Jacques, we 
discourse on the nothingness of man's estate, — 

" And so from hour to hour we ripe and ripe, 
And then from hour to hour we rot and rot." 



100 THE FINEST WALK IN ENGLAND. 

How blessed it is to look up to the more glorious 
towers in more enchanting landscapes, and to feel that 
they, being built on truth and righteousness and love, 
shall endure forever ; and that all that dwell there shall 
dwell forever ; for no robber's hand built, and no rob- 
ber's blood transmits them, but His hand who formed 
the worlds, and His blood that was poured out, not for 
His agrandizement, but for our salvation. That freely 
imparted to us, shall give us an everlasting title to the 
wonderful inheritance. May you and I, good reader, 
so fight against ourselves that we may have a right to 
the tree of life, the waters of life, and the gardens 
of life, and may enter in through those gates into that 
city. 

But the day grows apace, and the lounging Jacques 
must put his feet in harness if he would see Stratford 
before nightfall. It is five mUes yet to Warwick, and 
fourteen to Shakspeare's house. So the green banks 
that once were covered with stately halls must be aban- 
doned by the musing Marius ; Leicester and Elizabeth 
must flit before us no longer, kingliest ghosts, with 
pretty Amy Robsart in her pale robes and paler face, the 
avengiQg deity of the splendor and the sin. The old 
women at the gate are neither love-lorn queens nor 
damsels, but common-sense matrons, anxious to sell 
their pictures, penny-buns, and peanuts. I patronize 
their whole stock and push forward to 



"WARWICK. 

The town is perched on a steep slope, its chief 
church on its summit, and rejoicing in tombs of ducal 
if not royal grandeur. Richard Beauchamp's, shining 
in brass, surpasses all rivals in the realm except Henry 
the Seventh's at Westminster. The castle is well 
preserved. Its halls are laden with the spoils of ages ; 



THE FINEST WALK IN ENGLAND, 101 

its grounds He along the Avon, a forest of Lebanon 
coming up to the castle's windows, and gliding off for 
many acres. The grand old cedars, broad-girted, wide- 
branched^ heavily drooping, are the almost millennial 
offspring of germs brought from the Holy Land by a 
gallant crusader of the house. They honor their keep- 
ing, and even make me, with our forests primeval, sigh 
for the glories of British lawns. 



CHARLECOTTE PARK. 

The afternoon is well under way as I pass between 
the great ivy-clad towers that compose the gateway of 
the castle, and set my face Stratford- wards. The road 
plunges through a moist and mossy dell, and, a short dis- 
tance from the town, divides into two broad and superbly 
shaded avenues that both lead seemingly toward Strat- 
ford. Inquiring of a passer-by, I find that the one to 
the left leads there, via the Charlecotte Park, the home 
of the Lucys and of Shakspeare's deer. That prize 
wins the day. An aged gardener returning home be- 
guiled the road of its weariness. He was poor but 
intelligent, a native of Stratford, and thus to my fancy a 
neighbor of the poet's, — such as those with whom he 
when a boy had played; and, a man, associated. He 
spoke, as all the laboring men I talked with did, of the mis- 
ery of their condition. " A fine country you have here," 
I said. " Yes," he replies, " but we are like prisoners ; 
we can only look upon it ; we cannot touch it." " Why 
don't you graze your cows on the roadside ? The grass 
is rich and abunflant." " It is all owned by these gen- 
tlemen, sir. They will not let us touch a foot of it to 
save us from starvation. They wish us in Botany Bay, 
sir." This was said in a tone of bitter pathos, like a 
groan wrenched from a brave, enduring soul by the 
strain of the torturing rack. Years of poverty, of toil, 



102 THE FINEST WALK IN ENGLAND. 

of hopelessness were pressed into tliat response. He led 
me into one of those charming footpaths w^hich are 
found nowhere else in the world, and which only footmen 
can enjoy. It ran along the banks of the Avoi^ shaded, 
flowery, grassy, quiet, exquisite. He introduced me to 
a lady, as he turned aside to his cottage, who guided my 
steps to near the entrance to the park. She had chil- 
dren in America, and was full of inquiries about them 
and their new homes. . 

I leave her lively company, our paths parting. Soon 
the gate to the manor appears. The house stands near 
the gate, — broad, turreted, yellowish, aged ; not grand 
here, but would be so almost anywhere else. I pause/ 
to fancy the room where Shakspeare was tried, and 
have since regretted my lack of courage to solicit a 
closer inspection. The usual stillness of a lordly resi- 
dence reigns around. No open windows, no children, no 
noise, no life appears. It is like a tomb in Greenwood, 
supposing but one mausoleum stood solitary in its spa- 
cious grounds. The house passed, a path strikes through 
the forest to Stratford. It is a park of a thousand acres, 
unchanged probably in trees or deer since the days of 
that youthful rambler. The deer graze in herds, grace- 
ful and calm. They look at you, and move leisurely 
away as you approach, not so much seemingly through fear 
as through the reserve that the self-styled better bloods, 
both of beasts and men, show to the common races. 
They were the kindred, probably descendants, of Shak- 
speare's victim. The deer, the trees, the manor-house, 
the family, are almost unchanged. Three hundred years 
here are less than thirty with us. Their woods and 
beasts have thus preeminence over our men. 

Crossing the park, and striking the high road, a man 
riding overtook me. I asked the direction to Stratford, 
and he invited me to ride the mile or two which he was 
going. He was a middle-man in moderate circum- 



THE FINEST WALK IN ENGLAND. 103 

stances, a bustling Yankee Briton. He knew the Lucys 
well ; had had dealings with them. The present owner 
was hard, crusty, close, and haughty. He had had a 
quarrel with him, and refused to ever work for him 
again. Such a confirmation of their ancient fame from 
one entirely unconscious of that reputation seemed to me 
a very odd coincidence. Peculiarities of temper outlast 
those of genius. He pointed out an oak, straight and 
striking, that grew near Charlecotte Park, which he said 
was planted by Shakspeare ; what authority there is 
for the legend I know not. It suffices to show how full 
the region is of his memory. The very spot where he 
entered and left the park on the expedition is popularly 
known. 

His house was a mile this side of the town, so I 
again took to my feet and entered the village with the 
setting sun. A broad and pleasant road led to the most 
famous rivulet in England : famous too not for a word ever 
sung in its praise or known to be written on its banks ; 
not for battles and national tide-turnings, but because the 
genius of the world was born and buried beside it. 

STRATFORD. 

Low hills lay along the southern horizon, tipped with 
the strange British glory of a shining setting sun. The 
river, some three or four rods wide, was crossed by an 
ancient bridge, and a chattering country village, with 
feeble pretensions to gentility and wealth, gives me a 
grateful welcome. The peasant citizens were lounging 
at the windows : the children, with the clattering wooden 
shoes and less noisy voices, filled the ear with rattling 
music. Dames and damsels of humble degree and 
apparel gossiped at the doors. It was the most cheerful 
sunset picture I had seen ; not unlike, though superior, 
to that which comforted me at Cockermouth and Keswick 



104 THE FINEST WALK IN ENGLAND. 

and Mauchline ; so intimately are the great poets united, 
I could easily see the boy Shakspeare in these clogs, 
the maddest and merriest of all his playfellows ; the youth 
in these sauntering juveniles ; the graybeard in these 
dignified occupants of the ale-benches. 

A broad street, as at Cockermouth, passes through 
the town, a mile or so in length. On this he was born, 
as was Wordsworth on that, though in a house of far 
less pretensions. It leads straight out to the fields, 
Shottery, and Anne Hathaway's home. From it, soon 
after crossing the bridge, one turns oflf at right angle 
into a shorter and more stylish street that follows the 
course of the river, on which stands his school and new 
home, built out of his London gains, and which ends 
with the church where he lies. These constitute the 
only real streets of the place. A few narrow lanes 
open out of them and complete the town. 

Footsore and weary, I turn in at one of these wel- 
coming doors, thinking — I must make the mortifying 
confession — much more of a mutton-chop and a soft 
bed than of Shakspeare and all the other mighty ones 
that have trod this or any soil. Undoubtedly, in this I 
had reached one level of perfect sympathy with the great 
masters. It is doubtful if their majestic natures crave 
food and rest more majestically than their pigmy kins- 
folk — the rest of the world. Though some hair-splitting 
Hamlet might deny even this oneness, and vassert that 
their superior genius is seen even in the motions of their 
lowest natures. They hunger not as other men. They 
are not thus weary and worn, and sick and sleepy. 
Caesar did not ask for drink, "as a sick girl," Cassius 
and Shakspeare to the contrary notwithstanding. Till 
some Uncle Toby shall sit in judgment on this problem, 
which, like all others, has its two sides, I shall persist in 
believing that my mutton-chop tasted as perfect to me as 
to the hungry Shakspeare, and that my bed was as sleep- 



THE FINEST WALK IN ENGLAND. 105 

compelling. It is consoling to our pride to think that 
man is of a common root, and is one, not only in his 
dusty origin and end, but in the great mass of his daily 
acts and emotions. Some may shoot their peaks, like 
mighty mountains, above their fellows ; yet, like the same 
heights, their summits are as nothing beside the broad 
bases which they hold in common with all the earth. 
For rare moments great souls rise into exalted uplifts 
of genius ; the common hours they spend with common 
humanity. Thus I solace myself now. But then, I 
must again confess it, I thought only of a supper and a 
bed. These secured, Shakspeare and Stratford, Kenil- 
worth and Warwick, British pride and poverty, were 
soon totally forgotten. 

SHOTTERY. 

The morning saw me up with the lark, perhaps before 
him, for he refused to salute me, though I anxiously 
solicited the favor. I pass down the silent street so 
noisy last evening, out beyond the Shakspeare house, 
which it was too early to visit, and soon entered the 
open fields; a walk ran through them older than the 
poet. A few ploughmen were "driving their team 
afield " ; the honeysuckles and buttercups and pied dai- 
sies welcomed me with their fresh smUes and odors. The 
path ends in a style and a narrow country lane, dotted 
with a few thick-thatched, mortar-walled huts, dignified 
with the name of house and cottage, but which hardly 
claim so worthy titles. Elms droop over the road, and 
the air is possessed with the unspeakable charm of a 
dewy morning of spring. 

A turn now to the left and then to the right, and a cot- 
tage is seen with its end to the street, taller and larger 
than its fellows, standing in a garden on the side of a hill. 
A portly dame ushers me into a respectable hall, carries 



106 THE FINEST WALK IN ENGLAND. 

me up-stairs, shows a bedstead ' that belonged to Mrs. 
Shakspeare, but does not show " the second-best bed 
with the furniture " with which her husband consoled 
her for his death. This may have been " the furniture." 
It is undoubtedly like unto that which she thus received. 
The family were evidently superior to their neighbors, 
though their straitened means had compelled them to 
partition off and rent a portion of the place. The hUl 
was covered with an orchard, and the air was heavy 
with blossoms. Jessamine climbed over the door, under 
which perhaps Will of the market-town had kissed the 
handsome lass of the hamlet in the happy moonlight, 
centuries ago. They were "misgraffed in respect to 
age," and so are adjudged by his biographers to have 
lived unhappily ; though on what foundation it is hard 
to say, — the second-best bed being doubtless their own 
couch, and her own rights giving her, without regard to 
the will, a handsome fortune. 

THE HOUSE. 

Back I come through the little, poor, unseemly cluster, 
through the field of blossoming clover, and enter the 
broad Henly street into which the paths concentrate, 
and soon stand before a low-browed, plastered, black and 
white striped building, not older nor younger, not uglier 
nor comelier than many of its fellows. It is close upon 
the sidewalk ; a sign once swung from under its shaggy 
eaves, and a butcher's stall yet thrusts out its thatched 
brow from a corner over a windowless aperture, now 
boarded up, through which John Shakspeare, or some 
subsequent possessor, passed meat and vegetables to the 
scolding Dame Quickleys and the genteel Mistress Fords 
that reigned here as well as at Windsor and London. 

A bell rung brings a decayed gentlewoman from a 
snug modern house close by ; the rude door swings open, 



THE FINEST WALK IN ENGLAND. 107 

and I am ushered into the birth-place and youth-place 
of " Nature's sweet marvel." What does the gorgeous 
flower care for the soil where it grew ? All earths are 
alike. The dunghill can breed as wondrous beauties as 
the most sifted soils of the hot-house. This small, 
square, low room, with its floor of broken flags, can 
this be the spot where that keenest and quickest of souls 
scattered unconsciously the diamonds of its meditations 
and the lightnings of its merriment ? And this kitchen 
behind, smaller than its small forerunner, — could he 
here have teased his mother for bread, been boxed on 
the ears for his contumacy, sulked or laughed in all 
the changeful moods of childhood ? 

Creep up that narrow stair that goes up from beside 
the kitchen-fireplace, and you emerge into a larger but a 
like low and paltry chamber, with its cheap walls, plank 
floors, a little window full of littler panes, with a ribbed 
ceiling like those in our ancient kitchens, but, unlike them, 
covered thick with the ambitious names of unknown ad- 
mirers. Why don't they scribble the pages of his works, 
with like reduplications of their vain show ? Such a rec- 
ord will give them greater hopes of immortality. There, 
at least, their name will stand forth as distinct and legible 
as their kakography can make it, and no palimpsest can 
obscure it with his tamer autograph. A good relief is 
this for the itch of notoriety which such spots inevita- 
bly sets on flre in the cuticle of the soul. We adapt 
Johnson's " Who drives fat oxen should himself be fat " 
to the place and hour, and foolishly fancy that who sees 
great places, lo ! himself is great. But one autograph 
you never find in such place, that of him who makes 
it famous. Shakspeare never indulged in the youth- 
ful folly of scribbling on his mother's walls. If he had, 
a slap at him and a wet rag on the spot, would have 
obliterated all such desires and traces of immortality. 
The house has nothing marked but its poverty and na- 



108 THE FINEST WALK IN ENGLAND. 

kedness. Yet to the lad it was neither. It was his 
home, where he rejoiced in his mother's smile and feasted 
on her barley-bread. Modern writers seek to make his 
blood gentle, and even noble. His mother was Mary 
Arden, a descendant of him who ruled at Warwick Castle 
and gave his name to the forests between it and Kenil- 
Worth. However refined her blood, the simple fare of a 
butcher or farmer must have been all she could grant 
her bright boy ; and this was blessed with the benedic- 
tions of her loving heart and gracious ways. We leave 
this problematical cradle and hie to the more certain 
grave. 

THE CHURCH AND ITS YARD 

are down the street that skirts the river. New Place, 
his last residence, was built in this street, though but 
few, if any, vestiges of it exist. Near its site is a long 
monastic pile, not uncomely in age and architecture. 
Hither he crept along "unwillingly to school." Just 
beyond, in a garden of graves, rises the church, almost 
cathedral in its dignity. A path, arched with young 
trees, led through the yard to the door. Up its broad 
nave the verger walks, and halts at the foot of three or 
four steps that ascend to the chancel. These steps run 
across the church. Ascend them, and on the wide pave- 
ment at your feet you see a gray flat stone, six feet by 
two. On it are the well-known lines in the not so well- 
known spelling. Thus it reads : — 

" Good frend for lesvs sake forbeare 
To digg the dust encloased hears 
Blest be ye man y* spares thes stones 
And curst be he y* moves my bones " 

There is no name nor date upon the slab. Not a few 
doubt that it covers his remains. And many is the 
curiosity that the curse whets and terrifies. Had he 
wished to have kept himself in perpetual remembrance 



THE FINEST WALK IN ENGLAND. 109 

he could have hit upon no happier expedient. Somebody 
may yet despise the imprecation and rifle the grave, per- 
haps to find proofs that Miss Bacon was right ; that no 
Shakspeare is here, or that he was nothing, after all, 
but a successful manager, while Lord Bacon, or who 
you please, write his dramas. His bust is on the wall 
over against the grave. Between him and it lies his wife ; 
beyond him, his children and grandchildren. The family 
stretches almost across the chancel, having the most hon- 
orable place in the church, and showing that they were, 
at least, people of consideration in the city of Stratford. 

THE CHURCH-YARD. 

On the gravestones without were many Shakspeare- 
isms. As Burns and Wordsworth have the flavor of their 
soil in their poems, so has Shakspeare that of this in his. A 
collection of Stratfordisms has been made from his works, 
sufficient to prove to some the authenticity of his author- 
ship. The cemetery bears tokens of his kinship to his 
neighbors. A quaint, original, humorous, profound charac- 
ter is stamped on many a headstone. I copied several, 
but, unfortunately, lost them in descending Vesuvius. I 
would advise any tourist to give this yard, especially its 
old stones, a thorough research. He will find much to 
repay him. A friend found there this most happy quo- 
tation from one of his sonnets, over the grave of a youth. 
It would have hardly been thought of out of Stratford : — 

" The summer's flower is to the summer sweet, 
Though to itself it only live and die." 

The grass covered these long homes with velvet ver- 
dure. Trees were sprinkled protectingly among them, 
true Philemons and Bauces, happy symbols of the eternal 
life of the sleepers. The graceful church lifts its many- 
fingered spires above, like loving hands outspread in sup- 



110 THE FINEST WALK IN ENGLAND. 

plication for the worshippers that throng below. The 
drowsy Avon, fringed with flowers and drooping-willows, 
steals along just behind the church. Did not the great 
soul, in some vacation visit, when London popularity and 
praise had become stale, and age stole on apace, wan- 
der in this yard and muse out " Hamlet ? " Here were 
the clownish diggers, there the uptossed skulls of wits and 
scholars "knocked about the mazzard with a sexton's 
spade." Did he not say often to himself, " Here's a fine 
revolution if we had the trick to see it " ? Did he not 
conceive here that rare jibe at some pestilent convey- 
ancer, with whom in his investments he had his conflicts ? 
— " This fellow might be in 's time a great buyer of land, 
with his statutes, his recognizances, his fines, his double 
vouchers, his recoveries. Is this the fine of his fines, the 
recovery of his recoveries, to have his fine pate full of 
fine dirt ? " And then, looking out on the sleeping brook, 
he sees Ophelia with her familiar wild-flowers, hanging 
among the willows, and his imagination falls into march- 
ing order : — 

" There is a willow grows aslant a brook, 
That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream; 
There, with fantastic garlands did she come 
Of crow-flowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples 
That liberal shepherds give a grosser name. 
But our cold maids do dead mens' fingers call them. 
There, on the pendant boughs, her coronet weeds 
Clambering to hang, an envious sliver broke; 
When down the weedy trophies and herself 
Fell in the weeping brook." 

Truly here is the centre of Shakspeare's life, where 
is that of all sincere souls, — in the grave. Not in his 
cabined infancy, nor breezy youth, nor busy manhood, 
nor wealthy age, nor slumbering gentility do we see the 
topmost height of the Colossus : but here, where the last 
of earth is lovingly encompassed by the first of heaven; 
where nature folds the dread conclusion of life in the 
tenderest of sympathizing arms, and the bewildered soul, 



THE FINEST WALK IN ENGLAND. Ill 

tossed with more perplexities than Hamlet can utter, 
looks up to the oft-weeping heavens and feels that they 
offer it divine consolation ; while the solemn temple re- 
veals the highest heavens whence alone comes, through 
Christ, perfect and perpetual light and peace. 

Long should I have loved to linger in this serene and 
blessed spot, and in the serener and more blessed moods 
that it inspires, — 

" In which the affections gently lead us on 
Until, the breath of this corporeal frame 
And even the motion of our human blood 
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep 
In body, and become a living soul." 

But such are not the privileges of a traveller ; a hungry 
heart, hungrier time, and hungriest purse ever hurry 
him away from the very spots he has the most longed 
to see, and where he would most prefer to dwell. The 
locomotive is sending forth its warning yells ; I reluc- 
tantly leave the meadowy home appointed for all the 
Stratford living, give a last, fond look at its streets and 
spire and low embracing hills, and turn my face and 
heart to Oxford. 




vn. 



OXFORD AND CAMBRIDGE. 




HESE lie together m our pilgrim wallet, though 
they were visited at opposite seasons. They are 
of one nature, and are seen best in each other's 
light. Next to the religious centres of England are the 
intellectual. Whether these are the birth-spots of single 
and preeminent souls or the phalansteries where many 
minds are developed, they are, to the student of the 
sources of her history and her life, more important than 
any lesser shrines of nobles or kings, or even than the 
centres, whether of battle or discussion, whence flowed 
the . streams of civil regeneration. Oxford and Cam- 
bridge have many things in common, yet in many they 
differ. The points in common are their economy, not 
of purse, but of service ; their style of buildings and 
grounds, the size and character of the towns. They 
differ in the general scenery of the region, and in the 
classification of their men of renown. This last distinc- 
tion is very largely a distinction without a difference. 
They were the extremes of my journey, — Europe and 
the East coming between them. Oxford I saw when 
but two weeks in England ; at Cambridge I spent my 
last Sabbath in the Old World. They form together the 
most perfect picture of a scholar's paradise. ' T were 
hard to say which is the most charming, but it is not 
hard to say that, compared with the twain, the univer- 



OXFORD AND CAMBRIDGE. 113 

sides of the continent are cheap and mean. It is not 
hard to say that no other cities possess so many attrac- 
tions to a retiring and studious mind. 

Oxford is about eighty miles west of London. Cam- 
bridge sixty north. The first is perched on a rolling 
knoll, amid like rolling scenery. The last is on a plateau 
as level as a floor. The colleges in Oxford are scattered 
over the city, — no two great ones being connected even 
in their grounds. Those of Cambridge are, with a few 
exceptions, on two streets, their front walls being often 
connected, and the rear gardens and parks thrown 
together. This is especially the case with the chief 
colleges, St. John, Trinity, King's, and Queens', with 
minor ones interspersed. Their grounds compose one 
long stretch of magnificent meadow, grove, and stream. 
Each university has about the same number of colleges 
and the same amount of income. Between both there 
is a healthful rivalry, which would be productive of 
great good were they within reach of the poorer classes 
and were they democratic in their tone, instead of being, 
as they are, especially aristocratic. As it is, their con- 
flicts are superficial and powerless. 

The best way to paint the picture on your eye is to 
walk first through the cities and then through one of the 
principal colleges. With no map to guide us, the route 
will be the more perplexing, yet patience will conquer 
it. Oxford, like every old European town, is a jammed 
together pile of dingy brick or stone threaded with 
narrow and crooked lanes. These lanes are mostly dig- 
nified with the name of streets, though a few are modest 
enough or honest enough to wear their true titles. 
There is a slight attempt at rectangularity, and in two 
of its streets breadth is joined with straightness. The 
chief of these, High Street, runs through the city. 
Leaving the station and winding round a new road we 

approach the ancient town. Before we enter its pre- 
8 



114 OXFORD AND CAMBRIDGE. 

cincts, to the left, twists away a dingy street, which, if 
pursued a few rods, brings you to the outermost and 
youngest of the colleges, Worcester. Beyond it is the 
printing-house of the university, a massive structure of 
stone. The grounds of Worcester are large, choice, and 
enticing, but better and older treasures are to be found 
beyond. So, passing this junction, and pushing up 
through bustling Queen's Street, crowded thick with 
petty taverns and shops, we emerge into the broader 
thoroughfare of High Street. Here the glories of the 
city first appear. The enthusiastic Oxonian declares 
that " it is universally admitted to be one of the finest 
streets in the world. For variety and magnificence of 
public buildings no city in Europe can ofier a compe- 
tition." One has learned to distrust British enthusiasm 
when he reads the rhapsodies of Kit North over Win- 
dermere. So while he would expect from such a 
statement a glory beside which the Place de la Con- 
corde or Champs Elysees should pale their beauty, 
he need not hasten to give unlimited credence to the 
assumption. And yet the boast in this case is not 
without foundation. Churches and colleges line the 
street. Some of the first are of ancient and humble 
aspect, their humility being set off with extremest pride. 
Among the dingy and petty grandeurs appears St. 
Mary's Church, a fine Gothic structure. In this church 
the university sermons are pronounced. Mansell, Farrer, 
Rawlinson, Arnold, Newman and Whately have here 
read lectures. It is still more memorable for the expul- 
sion of John and Charles Wesley from its pulpit, because 
they set forth there the doctrine of Justification by Faith. 
The Oxford of that day was almost as far gone from 
original righteousness as the body that excommuni- 
cated Luther for like utterances. The Church, with 
all its stateliness, is yet hard bound by the forms that to 
some worshippers are more than the indwelling spirit. 



OXFORD AND CAMBRIDGE. 115 

Such have no idea of Christianity except as conveyed in 
robe, lawn-sleeves and surplice, with a sing-song chant 
through the nose, and a form of sound words, — the form 
being much more important than the soundness. It is the 
banks of the river of water of life, not the Uving water 
itself, to which they look for refreshment. And yet it 
is much to dwell on the banks of that river. It may, and 
with many does, lead them to taste its sacred sweetness. 

The pulpit in which Wesley preached was taken out 
years ago. The Wesleyans obtained it and put it in their 
chapel, foolishly covering its rich oak with a coat of 
paint. This was too much after the fashion of their 
fancied betters : who cover the rich, primitive words 
and workmanship of the truth with their tasty varnish. 
The analogy ceases here. The Wesleyans did not harm 
the truth, if they did the spot of its proclamation ; they 
keep the inside sweet and pure, if they rob the outside 
of perfection. With their neighbors it is the soul that 
is painted. It is religion that is obscured, while its 
fane ls illuminated. The Wesleyans were going to 
scrape off the ugly coat. May St. Mary's also wash 
away its uglier formalities. She is doing it. Gladstone 
and Ai-nold, Goldwin Smith and Stanley, are signs of a 
coming regeneration. 

Standing here and looking down High Street you get 
your first and best sight of the real Oxford. On the 
one side stretch the stately massive walls of All Souls 
and Queen's College, on the other the equally ornate 
front of University College. Here, for the first time, 
one begins to understand what a college means in 
England. His ideas, gathered from American institu- 
tions, have framed it after their fashion, — an open lot, 
with buildings more or less numerous and handsome 
studding its surface. It is far otherwise. You see a high 
wall of stone like a city block ; except its windows are 
few, and its style castellated. Every college has 'its 



116 OXFORD AND CAMBRIDGE. 

own style of frontage, as lias every costly city building. 
Yet they usually have towers at each end, and two in 
the centre at the great gateway. Sometimes, as in 
Queen's here and in King's at Cambridge, the front is 
simply a wall, without being the outside face of apart- 
ments, from fifteen to twenty feet high, a lace open- 
work of stone, and adorned with arched windows, pin- 
nacles, statues, and every architectural delight. In 
almost all other cases this street side is a building like 
the rest of the quadrangle, occupied for halls, or by the 
officers of the college. Unless you are foolishly ex- 
travagant you will not explore every college, for the 
sixpenny and shilling fees of the various porters, janitors, 
beadles, butlers, &c., for opening their petty pets would 
cost you not less than twenty dollars ; and to no purpose 
would be such waste, for a general unity pervades the 
whole. This fee is the more exorbitant, because that 
most of the janitors stand sentry over their treasures, 
and could expose them to view by the turning of a 
key. They remind one of the keepers of cheap booths 
at country fairs. Each in front of his pavilion is 
vociferating the astounding merits of the monstrosity 
within ; and, we may add that the show is often as 
novel and valuable in the case of the fair as in that of 
these college curiosities. The force of this passion was 
curiously illustrated at the Seldonian theatre. This is 
a common looking amphitheatre, where the degrees are 
declared. Approaching it, an old woman very gra- 
ciously asked me if I wished to go in. As the door 
stood open, I thought I would cast my eyes thither, not 
having time nor inclination for a long stop. I stepped 
across the threshold to get a gHmpse of the gaudily 
painted ceiling, when the door was instantly slammed 
to and locked. Suspecting the cause, I sought to open 
it.^ As she unlocked it she held out her hand for her 
sixpence, — twelve and a half cents. For once I as- 



OXFORD AND CAMBRIDGE, 117 

sumed the defensive. I had not intended to examine it, 
and had not. No matter ; she pointed to a printed 
notice, whoever enters, so the decree runs, must pay her 
a sixpence. I submitted, to my constant regret. I 
ought to have stood a suit at law, which would undoubt- 
edly have been commenced, and in which I should un- 
doubtedly have been worsted. 

One thing they strangely forget to tax: the quad- 
rangles and gardens of every college are entered free 
of cost. I wonder that, in their ingenious shift to pick 
strangers' pockets of the very nimble sixpences and 
shilHngs not so slow, they do not devise this scheme. If 
they get a glimpse of this suggestion, woe to the future 
explorers of Oxford. There '11 be a shilling demanded 
for every corridor, quadrangle, park, and path. 

Pass down the front of " All Souls," so called because 
it is dedicated to the souls of all the faithful people 
deceased at Oxford. If you are a Christian, and should 
die here, you will become a patron of the institution. 
It is old-fashioned, heavy, and with low windows peeping 
out upon us somewhat disdainfully. Boys once gam- 
bolled in its courts and rooms, gowned, studious, and 
roysterous, whom men call Sir Christopher Wren, Jeremy 
Taylor, Sir William Blackstone, Dr. Young, and Bishop 
Heber. The first touch of water to a bather is always 
shivering, no matter how much one longs for it, and 
speedily thereafter luxuriates in it. So this first list 
of names that you have read and heard from child- 
hood, sends a thrill of shivering ecstacy through the 
soul. You cannot go by. You must enter and explore 
the rooms and haunts of these celebrities in their un- 
known boyhood. Where did Wren dream out his 
" frozen music " ? Where did Blackstone classify and 
solidify the science of law ? Was not his couch truly a 
Lit de justice ? What room did Taylor, " the Shakspeare 
of divines," fill with his Christian Ariels ? If you inquire, 



118 OXFORD AND CAMBRIDGE. 

the porter knows nothing. He is ready to receive your 
shilling, but can give you nothing in return. He has 
no information as to the rooms haunted by the famous 
spirits. Only one could I find in both universities, — 
Dr. Johnson's, at Pembroke, a small room over the 
gateway. I asked for Whitefield's, of the same college. 
They could show me the stairs he washed and swept, 
but not the room where he flamed in prayer and praise, 
— a mount of transfiguration to the seraphic tavern-boy. 
Wesley's rooms, when fellow at Exeter, were also pointed 
out. They are on the second floor, right-hand side of 
the quadrangle, near the centre. The windows were 
open, though it was not five in the morning when I saw 
them, showing that his successor had something of his 
studious and early-rising nature, — I trust also of his 
fervent and prayerful spirit. These apart, all the rest 
were problematical. I inquired for Wordsworth's rooms 
at St. John's, Cambridge ; nobody knew them : of 
Wickliffe's, at Baliol ; of Kirke White's ; of many 
others, till I found inquiries fruitless. Are we not 
committing like error ? Who knows where John Adams 
roomed at college ? or Jonathan Edwards ? or the men of 
our own times, — Sumner, Phillips, Parks, and Emerson ? 
Who knows Seward's rooms at Union ? or Longfellow's 
at Bowdoin ? or Webster's and Choate's at Dartmouth ? 
or Olin's at Middlebury ? or Fisk's at Brown ? or Cal- 
houn's at Yale ? or Beecher's at Amherst ? Ought not 
each room to have the names of its occupants inscribed 
on its walls, not in the ambitious pencillings of those 
young notorieties, but in dignified collegiate paint, and, 
if need be, in like coUegiate dignity of Latin ? Would 
it not be well that each, as he left his apartments, should 
hang his picture on its walls ? The gregarious, and 
therefore useless class-picture might be well exchanged 
for this practice. 

Queen's comes next j newer, costlier, and adorned on its 



OXFORD AND CAMBRIDGE. 119 

central and flanking towers with statues. Its courts 
are very inviting. You can hardly be dragged past, if 
you are told that not a few kings' sons have been nursed 
by this Queen ; among the rest the two most famous in 
English royalty, Edward the Black Prince, and Prince 
Hal of Falstaff and Shakspeare. The room of the last 
is demolished, but the tablet and portrait that marked it 
are preserved in the library. 

MAGDALEN. 

Still proceeding up High Street we reach the river 
Cherwell, spanned by a beautiful bridge. On the right 
are the Botanic Gardens, a luxurious park of flowers 
and trees ; on the left are the heavy walls of Magdalen. 
Looking back from this bridge, which is your first view 
if you come by carriage from London, you will confess 
the boast of its men is not unmerited. The street is 
ornate, classical, venerable, grand. Having feasted your 
eyes on the spectacle, let us enter these high, buttressed, 
and towered walls, and examine the interior of an 
English College. Christ's Church might be better made 
the exponent of them all, but Magdalen took our heart. 
It is the loveliest and coziest spot in Britain. Were I 
to choose a haunt in which to live and die, like 

" The monks of old, 
To human softness dead and cold, 
And all life's vanity," 

I should choose this college over any I have seen in all 
the earth. It is the perfection of luxurious quiet, 
seclusion, learning, and beauty. We pass through a 
gateway over which, in canopied niches, are statues of 
the Magdalen, St. John the Baptist, the Virgin and 
Child, and the founder of the College, William of Y^eiyn- 
flete. Bishop of Winchester.* The quadrangle or court 
opens before us. Around its four sides is a deep, low, 
open arcade of stone, supported by heavy pillars, its roof 



120 OXFORD AND CAMBRIDGE. 

wrought in Gothic tracery, and the wall covered with 
emblematic devices. Above and behind these cloisters, 
as the arcade is called, are the rooms of the officers, 
the hall, library, and chapel, the last a gem of architec- 
ture. The open space enclosed by these buildings is a 
treeless carpet of turf. Passing through a low passage 
on the north side of the cloisters, you enter another 
enclosure like the first, surrounded with rooms for offi- 
cers and students. Yet another like lowly passage 
leads to a spacious park, fronting which is a fine edifice 
of stone, thirteen hundred feet long, also used for the 
rooms of students. Turning to the right in front of 
this building and crossing a graceful rustic bridge, you 
come to the college campus, a field of nearly a hundred 
acres, bound around with a river and a deep shaded 
walk. How profound its peacefulness ! Down this 
walk, here and there, are gowned and capped students, 
strolling, musing, or chatting. Across the tiny rivulet, 
behind the long new building, are seen herds of deer 
grazing and gambolling. The meadows, through the 
thick pleached walk, reveal the perfection of verdure and 
repose, while the trees that carelessly stud them seem 
like hanging gardens of correspondent greenness. A 
rustic mill at the end of this walk, clattering in the 
water, 

" The green silence doth displace, 
With its mellowy, breezy bass." 

Such are the meadows of Magdalen. The walk 
moves in a slight curve down its border for a quarter of 
a mile, till it reaches the miU, where it stretches itself 
out into straightness for almost a half a mile, and then 
winds back to the entrance on the other side of the 
grounds, along the banks of the Cherwell. The straight 
portion is the part known as Addison's Walk. Here the 
prose-poet, when a youth, wandered and dreamed and 
wrote. These rustic benches, or more rustic roots of 



OXFORD AND CAMBRIDGE, 121 

huge trees, were his favorite resting seats. The place 
and the man agree. Never was nature, material and 
spiritual, more fittingly married. The culture, grace, 
and tenderness of genius, are found in conjunction with 
the freedom and spontaneity of Nature. 

Other celebrities have paced these walks, — Cardinals 
Pole and Wolsey, Fox the martyrologist, John Hamp- 
den, Collins, Gibbon, Latimer, with scores of unfledged 
bishops, governors, and much, now forgotten, but at the 
time most worshipped trash of the nobility and gentry. 
Not the least of its honors is connected with the Crom- 
wellian era. In its halls he was entertained. Its pres- 
ident was one of his sympathizers. One of its fellows 
was John Howe, afterward his chaplain. The succes- 
sion in ability, if not in creed, is kept up, Prof Mansell 
being a fellow of this college. It was not term time, 
and so we lost the privilege of hearing the metaphysician 
of Oxford. 

THE BODLEIAN, BALLIOL, AND CHRIST CHURCH. 

We must turn our steps back, — lingering steps and 
slow they are, at leaving such loveliness. 

At St. Mary's, we turn out of High Street to the right 
and soon stand before the Rotunda of Radcliffe Library. 
Behind it rises the tall, square, factory-like walls of the 
Bodleian. It is built around a square, if those terms can 
be made to agree. You pass around its four sides for 
four stories, all crowded with books. "What a Sheol is 
this ! a home of departed spirits. The spirits seem as 
quiet in this cemetery as the bodies out of which they 
thus once escaped do in theirs. How few of the hun- 
dreds of thousands are ever disturbed in their slumbers ! 
How many of those that are, only spirits almost as dead 
as theirs, call from this vasty deep, — the ancient book- 
men of libraries, the ghosts of practical, earthly life, that 
walk this vast graveyard, untroubled, at mid-day. 



122 OXFORD AND CAMBRIDGE. 

But the thoughts this tomb of thoughts awakens are 
close and oppressive : let us to the outer air. Adjoin- 
ing the Bodleian are several buildings for the general use 
of the university, including the theatre where the old 
woman out-Yanke6d the Yankee. They front on Broad 
Street, parallel with High. Down this street we walk, 
passing on our left the narrow lanes upon which front 
the superb facade of Brazen-nose College, and the less 
stately, but to modern Christians more interesting, piles of 
Lincoln and Exeter. For in those rooms the godly club 
assembled, and Methodism was born and christened by 
a despising multitude. They form one common front, 
and are composed each of small old quadrangles, with no 
gardens attached. At Exeter, Samuel Wesley studied ; 
in Lincoln, John taught. 

The low-browed front of Balliol appears on our left. 
Pause here. In one of these antique rooms Wickliffe, 
the master of the College, studied. Here he translated 
the Scriptures. Here he wrote and taught till persecu- 
tion drove him into obscurity and the grave. How 
sacred the spot ! More sacred is the street before it ; 
for here his teachings, two hundred years after he had 
ceased to proclaim them, brought forth their sublimest 
fruit. Two bishops and an archbishop, the highest 
nobleman of the realm, went to heaven from fire and 
fagot blazing here. In the what was then the city 
ditch, but is now the opposite side of the street, Cran- 
mer's hand was roasted by Cranmer's soul. Here Lati- 
mer cheered " Bro. Ridley " with the prophetic vision of 
the fire that they, not their enemies, were then kindling 
in Britain, which should never be put out. He fought 
fire with fire ; and his airier and superior flames yet burn 
brightly, and will burn brighter and more consumingly 
here and everywhere. 

Walk a few rods farther, and you reach a little, old, 
low-roofed church, built, it is said, before the Norman 



OXFORD AND CAMBRIDGE. 123 

Conquest, and rich m ancient and modern gems of sculp- 
ture and architecture, — richer in memories. For here 
Wickliffe preached and prayed among his Balliol boys. 
Here he denounced the corruptions of Rome, and advo- 
cated an open and an English Bible. This was fitted up 
for a college, in 1263, by Dervorgilla, wife John Balliol, 
the founder of the college, the father of John Balliol, 
King of Scotland. How the golden thread strings the 
more precious events upon it ! Wickliffe had hardly 
left his chair and the world before Jerome arrived at Ox- 
ford. The fame of the evangelical doctor was yet great. 
Jerome read his published and popular writings, carried 
them back to Prague, and indoctrinated Huss. Huss 
and Jerome transmitted the light from their blazing 
fingers to their Moravian disciples of Bohemia, and 
these to Luther and Wesley. 

" From age to age the bright succession runs." 

Adjoining this church is the Martyrs' Memorial of 
Cranmer, Ridley, and Latimer, a Gothic monument sev- 
enty-three feet high, superbly executed. It was erected 
but a few years ago, and is worthy of Oxford and the 
heroes it commemorates. 

A little beyond are the pleasant halls and more pleas- 
ant gardens of St. John's College, — the grounds being . 
the most exquisite of any in Oxford. In fact, they are 
too dainty. Dandyism in gardening- is as much a fault 
as in man. The beautiful earth, like its comely master, 
when unadorned is adorned the most. Still it is hard to 
censure so much loveliness. For a century it has been 
the shrine of Oxford devotion. It is the thronged prom- 
enade of Sunday afternoons, and has that happy mixture 
of town and country which suits the taste of city strollers. 
Turn back past the Memorial, straight down Corn Market 
Street, across High Street, where you had your first view 



124 OXFORD AND CAMBRIDGE. 

of the colleges, into St. Aldgate's Street, — that and G)rn 
Market being the same thoroughfare, though after the 
English fashion, seen frequently in London, it changes its 
name every few rods. High walls and grand, line the 
left-hand side, while green woods and fields allure us 
onward to its foot. This is Christ Church College, the 
largest of the Oxford foundations : walls and meadows 
are both its belongings. The walls are in the castellated 
style, heavy-browed windows, tall towers, and deep-set 
gateway. Enter it : a spacious quadrangle two hundred 
and fifty feet square is before you, — its central space 
a grass lawn, whose boss is adorned with a fountain. 
Ancient and noble buildings enclose the area. Chief 
in architecture is the dining-hall. Usually the chapel 
or the library is the crowning ornament. Here a more 
practised eye planned. And in this case the designer 
did not build greater than he knew. Cardinal Wolsey 
was a man " of an unbounded stomach." He knew that 
his weakness and strength were those of the people ; 
hence the corner-stone of his college is a kitchen. This 
he built and opened first. Upon it rose the dining-hall, 
and afterward the lesser adjuncts of picture-gallery, 
cathedral, lecture-room, and library. None of these last 
are from his hand. The chapel only was reached, and 
that left half-finished at his fall. As if foreseeing that 
overthrow, he hastens to complete his dining-hall. He 
knew that thus his fame would be as an odor of rich 
viands in the nostrils of a hungry posterity. He was not 
altogether unwise. Other founders are remembered only 
when at prayers, or wandering among books. He is 
daily held in grateful memory by feasting Sophisters. 

Hawthorne truly sets forth the potent passion of 
father Bull for beef. St. Mary's Hall at Coventry, 
which he describes, is surpassed by a score of far more 
costly halls built for the boys of Oxford and Cambridge. 



OXFORD AND CAMBRIDGE. 125 

This of Wolsey excels them all. It is one hundred and 
fifteen feet long, forty wide, and fifty high. The sides 
and roof are of richly carved oak. A dais at the farther 
end is intended for the royal visitant or student ; side- 
tables on the same elevation for noblemen or their sons 
and the officers of the College ; and the long tables 
stretching on the slightly lower level to the door are for 
the ignohile vulgus of gentlemen's sons. The dark-stained, 
oaken ceiling looked as if the smoking dishes of the hun- 
dred thousand dinners that had been eaten here had 
imparted to it of their unctuous richness, as the finest 
tobacco and turtle soups impart of their quality to their 
meerschaums and covers. One meal a day exhausts the 
capacities of this cuisine. At six o'clock the Christ 
Church animals are fed. Their breakfast is light and 
taken in their rooms ; they conclude the day with their 
highest and most agreeable reward for study. 

The chapel is the cathedral and interesting only for the 
monument of the melancholy Burton. Characteristic is 
his epitaph, written by himself: "Faucis notus, pau- 
cioribus ignotus, hie jacet Democritus Junior, cui vitam 
dedit et mortem Melancholia." Known to few, un- 
known to fewer, here lies Democritus Junior, to whom 
Melancholy gave both life and death. 

Emerging from the walls of this princeliest of Oxford 
schools, let us turn to its meadows. " The Broad Walk," 
deep shaded with ancestral trees, crosses it. Here the 
young gownsmen of Christ Church have taken their 
evening stroll for many generations. See the mighty 
presences of Bolingbroke, Dr. South, Sir Philip Sidney, 
Locke, Penn, Ben Jonson, George Canning, Robert Peel, 
Dr. Pusey, Villiers, the great Duke of Buckingham, 
John and Charles Wesley, all, as beardless boys, quietly 
or laughingly pacing these paths. The grounds are not 
as retired nor exquisite as those of Magdalen, but their 
ample space and wide walks make them not unlovely. 



126 OXFORD AND CAMBRIDGE. 

A path across these meadows leads to the 

ISIS. 

You could easily find the way, were it difficult, which it 
is not ; for crowds of ladies and gentlemen, of black-robed 
boys and boys in jockey-caps, shooting-jackets, and visor- 
less fez of many colors, w^ith shirts of like attractive- 
ness, are hurrying down the walk to its banks. A boat- 
race is coming off. The signal-gun for the start is 
fired just as we reach the thronged bank. Indian-like 
canoes, with the swaying backs of uniformed rowers, 
are shooting down the stream. They swing round the 
goal, and, like party-colored birds pulsing their wings, they 
press toward the hither bound. Gyas, Cloanthus, and 
Mnestheus, how they wave up and down like the Der- 
vishes of Cairo ! How their several patrons fill the air 
with encouraging or warning cries. It is only strange 
that they are not screamed in Latin, " Nunc, nunc, in- 
surgite remis, Hectorei socii!" 

" Olli certamine summo 
Procumbunt : vastis tremit ictibus aerea puppis;" 

only the blows of the rowers could hardly be said to be 
vast. They cut the water at the final goal and instantly 
throw up the oars and glide to their station like a down- 
swooping sea-bird on calm and even wing. The excite- 
ment and the crowds speedily die away. We walk into 
the pleasure-boats, fitted up with saloons for drinking 
and eating. Pretty bonbons of vessels, as near like a 
North-River steamer in size, looks, and utility, as a 
handsome doll is like a handsome woman. 

The Isis is outside of the College grounds, in this dif- 
fering from the Cam at Cambridge, which flows through 
the chief of them. It is a broader stream than that, and 
very respectable in this country, — not superior to hun- 
dreds of our own whose names are hardly known beyond 
their native wilds ; such as the Deerfield, the Mohawk, 



OXFORD AND CAMBRIDGE. 127 

the Patapsco. It is less romantic than these, less rustic, 
less lovely. Yet, embosomed in this melting scenery, it is 
tender, refined, enchanting ; embosomed in more melting 
memories that cover its bank with every sort of human 
passion-flower, born of greatest souls, religious, romantic, 
and royal, bloody and brave, patriotic and traitorous, it 
has treasures that no Indian river, famous only for the 
whoop and scalping-knife of aborigines, can pretend to 
equal. The history and poetry of our rivers is at that 
point in the life of these, when Caesar subdued the bar- 
barians on their banks. The Mississippi and Tennessee 
are rapidly maturing a higher life in the struggle that is 
reddening their waters. Yet it is still not unlike that 
which these rivers passed through when Christianity and 
heathenism, in the fifth to the seventh centuries, were 
fighting for the mastery of England. The life of scholars, 
of thought, culture, genius, has yet to give those and aU 
our streams their highest life. 

CAMBRIDGE. 

Let us fly through the midland counties to the north- 
eastern side of the realm, closing our trip on the Bed- 
ford level and Cambridgeshire fens. The railroad 
station receives us with its underground roadway across 
the track for baggage, and the overground roadway 
across it for passengers. This last is a peculiarity of 
England. No person is allowed ever to cross a track 
in the station-house. It does not prevail elsewhere, and 
is getting out of fashion at some of their depots. After 
a walk of a mile, along a wide, flat street, gray brick 
walls begin to close us in ; the street grows narrower, 
and soon assumes the contractions of an European town. 
The shops, inns, and separate residences are replaced 
on the left hand by a continuous and modest front of 
stone, two stories high, with flanking towers and a high 
iron fence before it. This is our first College, — Emman 



128 OXFORD AND CAMBRIDGE. 

uel, — not eminent save as the first we meet, unless it is 
also eminent as the college of Dr. Parr and Sir William 
Temple. Passing it a few rods, we see on the same 
side the yet more ancient and more modest front of the 
far more celebrated 

Christ's college. 

This you will be sure to enter. Massive towers flank 
the gateway. Two small quadrangles are before you, 
with nothing prepossessing in their appearance. At the 
rear of the last, in a straight line with the entrance, an 
iron gateway leads into a small garden, — only five acres 
in extent. Follow the left-hand path to near the farther 
wall. Standing by itself, in the edge of the inner and 
grassy area, is an old mulberry-tree. The mound about 
it is five or six feet high. Its branches are bowed with 
age and propped with stakes. In some respects it re- 
sembles the mulberry-tree in the ravine below Jerusa- 
lem at the junction of the valleys of Hinnom and 
Jehoshaphat ; save that the heap around the latter is of 
stones, — around the former of turf, — in this expressing 
the exact difference between Judea and Britain. The 
Jerusalem mulberry commemorates the spot of Isaiah's 
martyrdom; that of Cambridge, Milton's college days. 
For this was planted by " the lady of Christ's." His 
biographer says " there is no fact of universal biography 
better attested than that great men, wherever they go, 
plant mulberry-trees." The remains of one are shown 
in Groton, England, on the Winthrop manor, said to have 
been planted by the founder of the Massachusetts colony. 
And one long stood in New Place, at Stratford, reputed 
to have been planted by Shakspeare himself. "Whether 
or no this was set out by the lily hands of the London 
lad matters little. Here he walked and mused, and 
laughed and jested ; now with " divinest melancholy," 
now with " mirth and youthful jollity." 



OXFORD AND CAMBRIDGE. 129 

The boy of seventeen was not unlike others of his 
age. He was a good scholar, a good joker, as Hobson's 
epitaph shows, and a warm democrat even then ; for he 
would write no verses on the birth of the King's chil- 
dren, or on the occasion of the King's visit to Cambridge, 
both of which called forth a volume of university 
laudations. 

Not a few other famous men have walked as lads in 
this pleasant retreat ; Latimer, Quarles, Henry More, 
Cud worth, and Paley are on the list. I lingered under 
the old tree, sat on the bank, broke a twig from its 
bough, looked upon the high walls that shut in the ©ig- 
closure and the ancient buildings that confront it, and 
thought my thoughts. 

OLIVER CROMWELL. 

As we leave the College, we could wriggle round to 
our left through Petty Cury, — the Anglicizing of the 
dignified Latin Parva Cokeria, — petty cookery, a name 
which it held six hundred years ago, and which its 
little eating-stalls yet merit, and so come by a few 
minutes walk to the grand colleges awaiting us. But 
we prefer to turn to the right, down a narrow lane, and 
glance at Sidney Sussex College where Oliver Cromwell 
studied, and, according to royal biographers, gambled and 
was the " fast man " of Cambridge. He was evidently 
afterward the fast man of the nation ; so fast that the 
nation has not yet caught up with him. One would be 
glad to know if he and Milton were acquainted here. 
Cromwell entered in 1618, Milton in 1624. If the first 
staid as long as the last, (eight years,) they would have 
formed each others acquaintance here. They must have 
talked over Cambridge life when in their government 
chambers at Whitehall, and wondered at the freak of 
fortune, or rather, as it was to them, the decree of 
9 



130 OXFORD AND CAMBRIDGE. 

God, that had lifted the sons of a Huntington squire and 
a London scrivener to the control of affairs, as Protector 
and Secretary of State, over the heads of nobles, prel- 
ates, and kings. 

It is one of the revenges that time likes to take, that 
the only name mentioned in my three guide-books — 
one the authorized Cambridge guide, and the others the 
most popular English guides — as connected with this 
college is that of Cromwell. Although against his name 
in the records is written " grandis imposter " " carnifex 
perditissimus, " and such complimentary phrases, yet 
he alone of its haughty scholars lives, and in him this 
venerable pile has its sole fame. 

JESUS COLLEGE. 

Keep on half a mile through narrow streets and 
partially open fields and you reach Jesus College, the 
most retired in either University. It is delightfully 
situated in green fields and gardens and open parks, 
which stretch out from its meadows into the illimitable 
country. Quiet, rustic, rural, the ivy covering its walls, 
next to the Oxford Magdalen it is the most attractive of 
scholastic retreats, though far inferior to that in richness 
of beauty. We could easily agree with King James, 
who said that if he lived at the University, he would 
pray at King's, eat at Trinity, and study and sleep at 
Jesus. Of those who have here studied and slept, as 
well as ate and prayed, were Cranmer, Coleridge, and 
Sterne. It is noticeable how the three reformers burnt 
at Oxford were trained at Cambridge. This has been 
their usual relation : "Wickliffe and Wesley, by their ex- 
ceptions, prove the general law; so perhaps do Arnold 
and Whately of to-day. 

Returning to the city, we follow the crooked ways, 
led by the rippling brook that keeps the fame of Hobson 



OXFORD AND CAMBRIDGE. 131 

fresh. For this rivulet that trips by Milton's College, 
and so round to Trumpington Street where all the great 
Colleges stand, flows from a conduit built by the carrier 
and donated ito the city. 

THE STREET OF COLLEGES. 

The first upon this street is far from the least. This 
has the rare credit of preserving its original brick ; most 
are faced with modern stone. These walls are still of a 
ruddy countenance. Their lowly windows, ivy tendrils, 
and the great area around which they stand, with the 
slumberous stillness of the place, give St. John's pre- 
eminence to an antiquary. It is the most poetical of 
colleges : though its new grand dormitories out in its 
park, among the stateliest and costliest in Europe, seem a 
little out of place beside the dear, delightful, old-fashion- 
edness of these three quadrangles. No wonder it has 
bred scholars. No wonder it yet gives most of the senior 
wranglers to the University. Roger Ascham and Bentley 
are to the manor born. So are its statesmen, — Strafford 
and Burleigh and Wilberforce. No wonder it has bred 
poets too. 

" Where they most breed and haunt, I have observed 
The air is delicate." 

What college can set forth such a table ? Ben Jon- 
son, Prior, Akenside, Kirke White, Herrick, Darwin, 
and Wordsworth. The first is claimed by both Oxford 
and Cambridge. Jeremy Taylor is likewise. 

The, next below — we are winding back to the station 
now, this street being nearly parallel with that on which 
Milton's College stands — is the richest of any in either 
University, — Trinity. Its three courts are spacious, its 
buildings grand, its pride immeasurable ; its renowned 
students more numerous and more famous than those of 
any rival. Read a portion of the list and hold your 



132 OXFORD AND CAMBRIDGE. 

breath, — Bacon, Raleigh, Herbert, Cowley, Barrow, 
Donne, Marvell, Dryden, Newton, Porson, Byron, 
Crabbe, Macaulay, Tennyson. Bentley and Barrow 
have been among its masters ; and Whewell and Sedg- 
wick, its present master and vice-master, still give i\ 
preeminence. 

Its library has Thorwaldsen's statue of Byron, New- 
ton's telescope, and other instruments, with a lock of 
his hair ; Milton's first draft of Paradise Lost, — pre- 
pared originally as a drama; Byron's first letter, — 
an open, childish one ; the tanned skin of a man, such 
as the Virginia ladies of the last generation had made 
into bonbons of the great forerunner of our war, Nat. 
Turner, and such as those of our day vrrought into like 
delicacies from the similarly tanned hide of the son of 
John Brown. Long arcades and pleasant courts make 
the place alluring. We would tarry long, but must pass 
on, by the pubhc buildings of the University and one or 
two minor colleges, and enter the sunny courts of King's. 
Its magnificent chapel stands by itself to the left of 
the entrance, — the most bepraised temple in England. 
It is worthy of its praise, with its fan-tracery roof of 
stone, its windows, walls, and pinnacles. But it is too 
small for grandeur. Its narrowness prevents that ex-r 
pansion of the soul which is essential to the sense of 
sublimity. Still its height and depth, its gloom and 
grace, give it great power over the feelings, and we could 
appreciate the emotions of Wordsworth as the mellow 
music of its organ stole over us, — 

" Tax not the royal Saint with vain expense, 
With ill-matched aims the Architect who planned, 
Albeit laboring for a sca,nty band 
Of white-robed Scholars only, this immense 
And glorious Work of fine Intelligence ! 
Give all thou cans't; high Heaven rejects the lore 
Of nicely calculated less or more : 
So deemed the Man who fashioned for the sense 
These lofty pillars, spread that branching roof, 



OXFORD AND CAMBRIDGE. 133 

Self-poised and scooped into ten thousand cells, 
Where light and shade repose, where music dwells 
Lingering and wandering on as loth to die, 
Like thoughts whose very sweetness yieldeth proof 
That they were born for immortality." 

We could pursue our walk yet further up the street 
and glance at many a quaint quadrangle made historic by 
well-known names, but the category would be lifeless to 
your unseeing eyes. Though I fear you will not forgive 
me, if I do not take you a few rods farther up, before 
we cross into the enticing grounds which confronted us, 
as we looked out of the door of King's Chapel, and show 
you the square tower hid away in a back corner of 
Queens' where Erasmus studied ; or, crossing the street, 
peep into the iviest quadrangle of either University, 
that of Pembroke, and let the heart beat fast with the 
memory that its green leaves gladdened the young eyes 
of the martyr Ridley, the poet Spenser, and the orator 
Pitt ; or step on a little farther and behold the corner- 
stone of Cambridge, — St. Peter's College, founded in 
1284, and rightly graced with the name of its most 
graceful poet. Gray. The record of its graduates shows 
how dire is the mortality of College greatness. Only 
four pebbles resist the rushing river of time, and two 
of them will be soon washed away, — EUenborough 
and Prof Smyth. Of the other two. Cardinal Beaufort 
is one of whom you never heard before, though " famous " 
is prefixed to his name on the catalogue, and Gray is 
the other, and he lives by one short piece of poetry 
only. That is the umbilical cord that connects him and 
his College to Earth and Man. Truly, speaking of his 
own once-renowned and self-confident fellow-gownsmen, 
he could say 

" The path of glory leads but to the grave." 

It is a great encouragement to the defeated wrestlers 
for college prizes, and to the larger crowd envious of the 



134 OXFORD AND CAMBRIDGE. 

slight advantages collegiate youth have over them in the 
race for honors, to walk the cloisters of St. Peter's, 
six hundred years old, and muse upon the vanity of 
human expectations. " Vanitas vanitatum ; omnia, van- 
itas." 

If you are bent on seeing the whole of the town, 
continue to follow up the brooklet. It soon leads you to 
the fine front of the Museum, and then to Hobson's 
conduit, and along its shady banks to the tasty, too tasty 
Botanic Garden, and so out into the starched and ironed 
landscape. 

Let us get back to Queens' and pass down a narrow 
street under the Erasmus Tower, and probably under 
the window where the witty Fuller cracked innumerable 
college jokes, some, doubtless, very poor, and hone, alas, 
preserved, probably, by the fledglings of to-day. We come 
upon a mill, a river, a bridge, and a deep-shaded wild-wood. 
Crossing the bridge and tracing our way through the sun- 
less thickets, we commence the longest path of linked 
beauty and fame to be found in England, if not in the 
world. From this point you can stroll through open or 
shaded fields down to the rear of St. John's, — a mile and 
more of loveliness. The great colleges are ever passing 
in review. St. Peter's, St. Catherine's, Queens', King's, 
Clare's, Trinity, and St. John's, with minor halls, lift 
their magnificent fronts along our right hand, just across 
the brook Cam. No one view in Oxford equals that 
from the centre of this extended park. Take your sta- 
tion at the foot of the path that strikes out from King's 
Chapel and look up and -down. On your right are the 
towers of Queens' and St. Peter's ; in front, the match- 
less beauty of the infantile cathedral and the tall walls 
of the adjacent buildings ; while to your left is the mas- 
sive simplicity of Clare, — the finest single building 
save King's Chapel, in the town, — the irregular piles of 
Trinity, and the stately Gothic of new St. John, all em- 



OXFORD AND CAMBRIDGE. 135 

bowered in the perfection of trees and grass, air and 
skies. For the very sun puts on the academic dress and 
antique airs here, and mellows down its transatlantic 
fierceness to an aristocratic indifference ; while the winds 
refuse to blow furiously either hot or cold. Nature is 
subdued to w^hat she works in. 

Under these ancient trees I sat and filled the walks 
with renowned forms. These beardless, broad-brimmed 
gownsmen are Byron storming away about proctors and 
principles, or Wordsworth stalking rustically, or Ten- 
nyson moodily, or Fuller laughingly, or Macaulay studi- 
ously, or Bacon subtilely, or White holily, or Newton look- 
ing skyward, or Pitt looking manward, or Henry More 
looking inward, or Milton looking Godward. How 
thronged the grounds with ghosts ! Not the Elysian 
Fields were fairer or fuller. The air grows thick. Spir- 
itualism seems the truest of realities. I can believe in 
anything but the mortal and visible. If I stay much 
longer I shall reach one phase of the apostolic experi- 
ence, whether in the body or out of the body I shall not 
be able to tell. I must snap the mystic web that is 
weaving about me. The clouds come nearer and drop 
their distilments on my bare brows. I find myself sensi- 
ble to rain, if to no other sub-stellar influence. The trees 
afford poor shelter. I wind through the last and not 
least exquisite portion of the long grounds, pass under 
the towers of St. John, through a curiously carved arch- 
way, over a curiously wrought bridge into the dear, old, 
lowly but enchanting brick quadrangles, out to the street, 
and into the " Petty Cookery " and the " Falcon Tavern," 
an inn as old as the times of Milton. Infected by the 
college style, it is itself a sort of a quadrangle. It had 
nothing to eat, and so only gave me shelter and a 
Barmecide feast of memory. I had had enough of the 
last under the trees, and therefore seek a more modern 
and more human refuge. 



136 OXFORD AND CAMBRIDGE. 

I attended service at the church where Henry Martyn 
and Simeon preached. The house was large and of un- 
adorned Gothic. It was full, the service was solemn, the 
preaching plain and simple, as all English preaching is, 
the place sacred with divinest influences. 

I have neither sufficient space nor knowledge to 
compare these seminaries with each other, or with the 
schools of the continent. In beauty of situation they 
are far superior to all rivals. In scholarship and pop- 
ular influence, inferior. The continental universities 
belong to the people. They are of and for the poor. 
These are of and for the rich. Heidelberg is cheaper 
than Yale or Harvard. Oxford is thrice as dear. If 
they were levelled to the masses and imbued with the 
spirit of the age, — the unity and equality of man, — 
they would be the most perfect of colleges. As it is, 
their influence is harmful to the people of England. 
Milton, Hampden, and Cromwell, must again appear at 
Cambridge; John Howe, Owen, and a democratic Wes- 
ley, — which "Wesley never was at Oxford, — before they 
become as all beautiful within as they now are without. 
Let Britain be emancipated, and these Edens, like the 
original paradise, will become the centres of the life of 
the nation, if not of the world. 





VIII. 




TOWARDS LONDON. 
gray's country church- yard. 

TOKE POGIS is the most unpoetical of names. 
Yet its church-yard is the most poetical in the 
world. Upon no God's-acre do such associa- 
tions grow as have covered that with a century of ten- 
derest life. No one visiting the famous spots of England 
would omit this. More than Dryburgh Abbey and the 
grave of Scott, more than Grasmere and Wordsworth, 
far more than Windsor and Westminster Abbey, does 
this little cemetery draw our hearts. Yet it is known 
but as the occasion of one brief poem. There are fune- 
ral orations in verse and touching epitaphs. There are 
long-drawn dirges, like " In Memoriam," " Lycidas," and 
" Adonais," where the singers seem to think more of their 
music than their grief. Gray alone makes us forget the 
singer and the song in the emotions which seem to flow 
naturally from the depths of our own experience. His 
perfect art is perfect nature. The solitude, silence, and 
sorrow are not for him and this church-yard alone, but 
for every heart and every grave. 

We take the cars from Oxford for London. The only 
noted place between the university town and the country 
church-yard is Banbury, which is celebrated in the works 
of our most popular poetess, Madame Goose. We look 
anxiously for the old woman of Banbury Cross, with her 



138 TOWARDS LONDON. 

white horse and profusion of bells ; but the childish faith 
failed of realization. 

We were solaced by a taste of the hardly less re- 
nowned Banbury pies. They are sold in wrappers that 
declared that the house which furnished them had man- 
ufactured the same for more than a hundred years. The 
pies were fresh and piquant notwithstanding their avowed 
age. 

Clouds gather thick and low as we are landed, near 
evening, at the Slough station, about two miles from the 
Stoke-Pogis church-yard. The sure-hastening rain shall 
not prevent the gratification of joining together the spot 
and evening. We enter on a pleasant rural road, lined 
with stately trees, and opening out into one of the soft 
rolling landscapes that make England the most perfectly 
finished land on the globe. 

Before us, on a slightly swelling slope, rises the white 
tower of the church. As we draw near to it the clouds 
draw near to us, and " drop their garnered richness down." 
But rain is no mar to adventure or scenery in England. 
The waterproofs cover head and shoulders, and we take 
a stile and a path across the fields through grass wetter 
than the poet found it when, a melancholy youth, he 
brushed away the morning dew in a similar tramp, per- 
haps in this very path. 

A wild, tangled road winds in front of the church. On 
a knoll close by the road is a stately monument to the 
memory of Gray. We pass it now, more anxious to 
see his real monument, the yard itself, than any that 
modern admirers have raised to his name. It is but a 
walk of a few rods across an open field and the sacred 
spot is reached. Grand old trees stand here and there in 
the pasture, and you can hardly tell where the field ends 
and the cemetery begins. New graves are here, those of 
the later fathers of the hamlet. Slight modern improve- 
ments of railing, shrubbery, and marble, show that the 



TOWARDS LONDON. 139 

rudeness of the ancestral tombs is becoming mollified. 
The church itself is of the universal type of old-fashioned 
English churches. Wesley's at Epworth, Bunyan's at 
Elstow, Wordsworth's at Grasmere, Southey's at Kes- 
wick, are of similar type. The square tower rises from 
the front ; a rustic porch enters its side ; the walls are 
overgrown with ivy, and its air is venerable in the ex- 
treme. One great mistake some modern innovator has 
made, — the steeple is painted or washed white. It glit- 
ters like fresh marble. The feeling of reverence is rudely 
shocked by the " improvement." Like a glossy wig in 
the place of gray hairs, it mars far more than it adorns. 
Behind the church a high wall, running south and 
west a few rods, shuts in the reverend spot. Trees 
crowd thick against the wall, and graves crowd thicker 
beneath them. They line the walk to the church porch, 
and fill the narrow space with their grassy drifts and 
gray mementos. The seclusion and silence are inex- 
pressible. Nowhere have I felt it so deeply. Grasmere 
among the mountains seemed far more public than this 
recess, not five miles from Windsor, not twenty jfrom 
London. The hour combined with the scenery. A 
hundred years evanished in a thought. The quiet poet 
seemed wandering here at eventide. He sits on this 
flat-roofed tomb. He sees 

" Beneath those rugged elms, that yew-tree's shade. 
Where heaves the turf in many a mouldermg heap. 
Each in his narrow cell forever laid, 

The rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep." 

The elms, yews, and heaving turf are all around me. 
Eton and Windsor, though in view from neighboring 
points, are not visible from this spot ; yet they are near 
enough to suggest contrasts favorable to these " narrow 
cells," on which he dwells in daintiest phrase of deepest 
solemnity, — 

" The path of glory leads but to the grave. " 



140 TOWARDS LONDON. 

Like him, I sat and saw 

" Now fade the glimmering landscape on the sight," 

" The lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea," 

" The ploughman homeward plod his weary way; " — 

the same untutored, unelevated, hard-toihng ploughman to- 
day that he was a century since, though poorer than then, 
and more degraded, because he has abided so long in de- 
gradation, while aU nations about have measurably, and 
some have immeasurably arisen. He disappears from 
my eyes as from those out of which then looked that 
sad, pathetic soul, and 

" Leaves the world to darkness and to me." 

The mysterious sympathy of soul with soul never was 
more oppressively revealed to my consciousness than as 
I sat on these aged graves. Almost every line of the 
" Elegy " recurred to me, though I had not read it for 
years. I was regretting before I had arrived that I did 
not have it with me, but I found when there that there 
was no need of regrets. I had it with me in very living 
type. The lines came out in my memory without diffi- 
culty, — without even conscious effort. I almost looked 
to find among these half-buried headstones the epitaph 
with which the poem concludes. It seemed as though 
some youth must have laid here then, whose story he had 
made his own. 

One thing I sought to hear and failed. He said, when 
he reclined here, — 

" From yonder ivy-mantled tower 
The moping owl doth to the moon complain." 

The ivy-mantled tower rose before me, but the moping 
owl was silent. Perhaps because the moon was not 
visible, perhaps because he was too moping even to com- 
plain. Like every other attempt to make the acquaint- 
ance of the birds of English poetry, it failed. I walked 
early through Shakspeare's and many other fields to 



TOWARDS LONDON. 141 

hear a lark. I walked late to hear nightingales. But 
lark, nightingale, and owl, disdained to confer their notes 
upon Yankee ears. They had imbibed the prejudices of 
their countrymen. If they appear no better on acquaint-* 
ance than many of these, silence, in this case, was golden 
to the unhearing, whatever it was to the unheard. 

But if the owl failed me, it had a modern substitute, 
the only change that I could see from a century ago. 
The screaming locomotive did to all ears complain. Its 
shrill cries rent the solemn silence, and more than re- 
placed the owl and his choir, " the droning beetle," 
" And the drowsy tinklings of the distant folds." 

It shocked the nerves and well-nigh shattered the whole 
impression. Had it stole in, mournful and musical, it 
would have been fittingly woven into the picture. But 
it tore through with roar and yell that made me fear 
that a troop of screaming vampires were rushing from 
these still graves. Fortunately two miles of space dead- 
ened slightly the tumult, but not enough, I fear, to suit 
the owl and beetle. They declined to take a second part 
under the new leader, and, like displaced choristers inside 
this, I have no doubt, as of many less ancient churches I 
wot of, they have left the choir and subsided into a dog- 
ged silence. 

But the rumbling and torturing noises grow less fre- 
quent. Mght moderates, if it does not completely abate 
the nuisance. Th^ noiseless spaces become longer and 
less rarely interrupted, and I feel in the pauses how 

" All the air a solemn stillness holds." 

But the rain comes faster, and the darkness gathers 
close about me. I must go, for it is two miles and over 
to my hostelry, and rubber coats are poor protectives in 
plunge-baths whatever they may be in shower ones. 

As I leave the deep-shaded recess, I pause in front 
of the church. Just outside of the deepest seclusion, 



142 TOWARDS LONDON. 

where the surrounding landscape breaks upon the sight, 
is a narrow, high tomb, holding the bodies of Gray, his 
mother, and his aunt. A touching inscription of his to 
his mother is on one side ; a simple statement of his 
own interment on the other. You can pass down the 
path and go by the pleasant lodge, perchance a vicarage 
hidden in shrubbery, or strike back across the field, and 
visit the monument to his memory. A fosse and fence 
debar intimacy. How unlike his real grave and grave- 
yard ; how like an English gentleman's ideas of the 
fitness of monuments. All are under lock and key, even 
if out of doors. A gigantic urn rests on a lofty pedestal. 
Verses from his poems are on the sides. Across the 
fields, in the distance, appears the mansion originally 
occupied by William Penn. The silent Quaker is easily 
associated with the taciturn poet. John Penn erected 
this monument. I forget both it and him, as I cast 
many " a longing, lingering look behind " to that real 
graveyard and its protecting church. I thought of those 
around here, of whom one may yet say, as he has said 
of their fathers, — 

" Far from the maddening crowds' ignoble strife, 
Their sober wishes never learned to stray; 
Along the cool sequestered vale of life 
■ They kept the noiseless tenor of their way." 

How enviable seems such seclusion and peace ! Life 
to them is quiet as death ; their garden is as their grave. 
And stiU it is rather to be sought as a relief than an 
existence. The work of man is with man. The Son 
of Man did his Father's business in crowded cities. The 
retreats of nature were for his refreshment, not for the 
duties of life. Thus serenely does this green desert 
becalm us. Yet it cannot detain. It is the home of 
the sleeping body, not of the working soul. We break 
from it with a heart-pang such as no British spot caused, 
save, perhaps, Grasmere. How many a wanderer and 



TOWARDS LONDON. 143 

,, -worshipper shall come hither to soothe his soul in this 

--^perpetual and blessed calm ! 

The night closed in dark and heavy with rain. I 
groped my way, wet and weary, back to Slough, and 
felt almost as if lifted out of the grave when the cheery 
country inn smiled upon me with its warm salutations. 



ETON. 

The rain is over by morning, and the indifference to 
human pomp and vanity that boastfully preambled the 
-fevisit to the church-yard is also gone. 1 feel an Eng- 
ajlishman's passion for the paths of glory, and hasten to 
\';'walk therein. The clean, humble, ancient inn of Slough 
gives me a nice breakfast of chops and rolls, washed down 
with poor coffee and rich memories of Gray, Herschel, 
and Coke, who each doubtless sipped ale on its 
benches. Then begins a long day's walk through ce- 
lebrities of every class, — scholastic, monarchical, and 
scenic, all having the extraest flavor of antiquity. An 
hour's walk through the usual landscape of England, and 
the Thames is reached. From its bridge is seen, on the 
opposite bank, stretching southward, the lawn of Eton, to 
whose luxurious perfection of tree and grass, the turrets 
of her chapel and the antiquated brick walls of her 
dormitories form a strong relief No bit of collegiate 
landscape at Oxford or Cambridge surpasses this in 
quality, though it is but a miniature of their magnifi- 
cence. The river is more. truly a river than the sleep- 
ing brooklets of Isis and the Cam. The park and 
buildings are almost as attractive as any in which they 
exult. Their chapel pinnacles are no unworthy type of 
those of King's ; the turreted halls, with their deep em- 
brasures, are fitting forerunners of the battlements of 
Trinity, while the trees stand thicker about them, a body- 
guard pressing close to its prince ; and the young grass 



IM TOWARDS LONDON. 

ripples at their yenerable feet in summer sun and shade 
and breeze ; and the flowing lines of bank and stream, 
add to their picturesque life, and give the needed air of 
completeness. 

Crossing the bridge, the narrow street of Eton is 
entered, ill paved, ill lined, ill filled. Here and there a 
building, having probably some relation to the School, 
relieves the general ugliness. Flush with the street 
arises its front. A gateway admits us to the first quad- 
rangle. The dull red brick walls are thickly inter- 
spersed with deep-set windows. An inner quadrangle, 
with a wide arcade or cloister running round it, is be- 
sprinkled with begowned and becapped boys, walking 
and studying. These were the few students of the 
place, the jauntily dressed young gentlemen in the street 
and on the play-grounds being the residents, whose purse 
and title pass them through the course, with the acqui- 
sition of manly games in place of more manly brains. 
Boating is the passion here, as at Oxford and Cambridge, 
with a far finer field for its display. 

The great lads of Eton were walking in ghostly 
gowns and caps before my inner eyes. I saw the young 
Pitt, haughty and cold ; boisterous, roysterous Fox ; 
meek-mannered Gray ; laughing, joking, studying, writ- 
ing, ever-triumphing Canning ; the silent, little Welling- 
ton ; (was he famous in the college ring, or was he a 
spooney, or, like our Grant, nothing in particular ? His 
reported remark, that " Waterloo was won on the Eton 
play-grounds," suggests that he was captain even here) ; 
and chief in my thoughts, because he made the most 
of Eton, the gay scholar, rhymist, boatman, and boxer, I 
saw Winthrop Mackworth Praed, the most laughing soul 
that ever talked poetry and politics. A brilliant lad is 
not always a brilliant man, and vice versa. Indeed one 
of the great masters of Eton, Sir Henry Saville, has 
recorded his verdict in the still-recurring, never-ending 



TOWARDS LONDON. 145 

fight between genius and talent in these strong words : 
" Give me the plodding student. If I would look for 
wits I would go to Newgate : there be the wits." 

Not the least odd in its suggestions is the fact that on 
the foundation of this college, 1441, the king excluded 
from its privileges illegitimates and serfs. This last 
class were called natives, and show that after nearly four 
hundred years of Norman government, the natives or 
Saxons were equivalent to slaves. It may lower an 
Englishman'^ crest a little, as well as that of his equally 
self-important American cousin, to see that the proudest 
feeling he indulges only proves his slavish origin ; the 
brand is on his nativity. 

WINDSOR. 

But Eton is keeping us too long, with its quadrangles 
and play-grounds, chapel and refectory, boys and mem- 
ories, street and stream. Let us push forward to the 
seat whence it sprung. Two miles of meadow walk, by 
the side of the smooth-flowing Thames, brings us to the 
cramped and crowded village of Windsor. The street 
hugs the hill ; homeliness and beauty, meanness and ma- 
jesty, are in painful conjunction. There is nothing more 
sickening to a believer in the Preamble of the Declara- 
tion than the contrast of castles and their engirting ham- 
lets. A few thousand barnacles are these human beings 
sticking to the sides of this huge man-of-war. Through 
their midst roll the chariots of the regal and noble, while 
they, in true Juggernaut style, cast themselves slavishly 
beneath the wheels. When the castle is dismantled, the 
peasantry still abide. The wrecked ship is not stripped 
of her barnacles. Thus Stirling, Lancaster, and Kenil- 
worth have their subjacent hovels hanging round their 
empty or ruined walls. 

10 



146 TOWARDS LONDON. 

THE CASTLE. 

Windsor is no exception to this rule. Her mighty 
towers spring precipitantly from a steeply climbing 
street whose base and ascent are peopled with several 
thousand servants of the Queen, dwelling largely in 
appropriate plantation quarters. The streets are nar- 
row, mean, and miserable. As an American sovereign, 
we — this is the regal pronoun — disdain the humble 
and probably happier villagers, and pass up the winding 
way between the gigantic walls that rise like a prison 
on either side, and through the gates emerge into an 
open space, surrounded with massive buildings of every 
age and style. Before us is the chapel ; at right angles 
with it is the comparatively short course of rooms that 
constitute the Queen's private apartments ; while, in ir- 
regular continuation of the chapel, are two thousand 
feet of stone, cut up into many structures, interspersed 
with towers, round, square, and many-sided. Its far- 
ther portion looks down on the private grounds of the 
palace, with which the Queen's apartments also connect. 
A high iron fence keeps your feet but not your eyes 
from exploring this garden, lawn, and grove. Satisfying 
them, we penetrate the Castle. Unfortunately being on 
the way to London, I have no pass such as could be 
obtained there, and the royal state-rooms are closed to 
my democratic eyes. But they can be feasted on two 
scenes, the most regal and the most natural, the source 
and the end of all the living, — the landscape and the 
tomb. Come through this corridor built by Elizabeth. 
Wind up and down these crooked passages, like one 
of her supple courtiers suing for favors. Like some of 
these, you will get them. Out on the terrace you 
emerge, after due twistifications, and there lies below 
you the finest landscape in England. As all Britons 
have a striking family likeness, so has all Britain. This 



TOWARDS LONDON. 147 

is the best of its class, as, considering its relations to 
royalty, it should be. For miles the eye wanders over 
meadow, forest, and stream. The Thames winds its 
silver thread through a velvet of green, tufted with the 
deeper green of dense-leaved trees, now single, now 
thicketed, like soldiers and officers on a field. The calm, 
close, warm, moist sky, clings to the earth as if loth to 
leave it for the cold empyrean ; a feeling in which I 
heartily sympathize. 

Not far hence you see a ragged trunk which tradition 
says was the oak where merrier wives of Windsor than 
even Mistress Ford and Page met in spectral pleasure. 
Although Heme's Oak has been cut down by royal com- 
mand, the people persist in giving this ragged Lear the 
royal honors of the departed. If he dies, as is more 
than probable is already the case, another will doubtless 
reign in his stead. From this point in a clear day, if 
ever such appear here, St. Paul's can be seen, twenty 
miles distant. Our view is limited to the nearer objects. 
Eton nestles quietly in her shrubbery, a little removed 
from us. The pastoral scene is unvexed with " the vile 
mechanicals " of the village, as we fear royalty and 
its supporters deem them. Woods, waters, land, and 
flocks, — these are the sole picture. 

This is the Home Park, but four miles in circumfer- 
ence, yet so adjoined to other parks that not a village, 
hardly a spire, offends the aristocratic eye. And this 
within a half-hour's ride of the greatest metropolis in 
the world : so exclusive of men and inclusive of land is 
the aristocracy of England. 

On this terrace many kings have walked. The Virgin 
Virago made it her daily promenade ; so did Charles the 
First and Second, James the Second, and George the 
Third. Cromwell also enjoyed the view, from these 
walls, when he ruled the realm. So you are in re- 
nowned company as you sit or saunter here. The 



148 TOWARDS LONDON. 

unbroken front of Windsor salutes you here in all its 
grandeur. Go where you may, no such greatness will 
elsewhere appear. After seeing nearly every palace in 
the world, from the Tuileries to the Vatican, I can 
safely reaffirm my first untried impression. The Doges' 
Palace is more symmetrical and wonderful in genius ; 
but that is not, like this, beautiful for situation. All 
else are cheap ; this expresses immense power, wealth, 
and pride. 

Turning back we enter, as a fitting conclusion of 
Windsor, the Chapel of St. George. Its contrast to the 
church-yard of Gray is more marked than its conclusion. 
That is the same. The dust of Wmdsor Park and 
people may be more attractive in its living forms ; but 
its original and ultimate elements are of the universal 
kind. The most obsequious man I ever met is the 
verger of St. George's. His voice sounds hollow from 
below. He is pompously domineering and deferential, — 
a not uncommon mixture : in fact, the perpetual mixture 
of a flunkey. His port was magisterial beyond a 
prime minister's, yet how greedily he hankers for the 
shilling. We are out of time, but that silver talisman 
opens almost the vaults of kings : he would have clearly 
had a severe conflict between his reverence and his 
covetousness did we offer a sufficient inducement for the 
desecration. We respect his devotion to kingly dust, 
and spare him the temptation of exchanging it for our 
golden dust, more current, if not more valuable. 

The Chapel is ornately Gothic ; high, deep and empty. 
It consists of a single vault, without pillars or aisles, 
as is King's Chapel, Cambridge. Great windows throw 
their fiery radiance upon the floor. The chancel occu- 
pies an oblong section of its western side, enwalled 
nearly to the roof. That will hold but a hundred or two 
of people ; enough probably to satisfy the pride of the 
household. At the entrance of the chancel are the 



TOWARDS LONDON. 149 

stalls of the Queen and her husband. Around the 
walls were the stalls of the Knights of the Garter ; 
over each hung his banner. Death only removes them. 
That of the Prince Consort was not yet gone ; he having 
but just died. But it must be taken down, as have all 
that preceded it for ages and ages. In the centre of 
the aisle, near the altar, stood a large vase full of flowers. 
They were put there by the Queen's hand over the vault 
below where her husband reposed. He could not be 
allowed, the verger said, to be buried there, as only the 
blood royal, or more properly the dust royal, could sleep 
in this chapel. Husband and wife must part company 
here, for both cannot be of the regal race. The force 
of folly could no farther go. Prince Albert's children 
could sleep here, but not their father. The Queen's 
father can lie here, but not her mother. How fine the 
thread that holds this system together. One strong 
puff of popular common sense and the whole aristocratic 
cobweb dissolves, and, 

" Like an unsubstantial pageant faded, 
Leaves not a rack behind." 

But grief, not contempt, best becomes the place. 
Under this pavement, and in the aisles without the 
, chancel, lie much of the Norman dust, so called. Henry 
the Eighth, Charles the First, Henry the Sixth, Edward 
the Fourth, George the Third and Fourth, and William 
the Fourth are beneath these pavements. You can 
tread upon their heads as indifferently as they would 
have trodden on yours when living. Some of these 
have brought their wives with them. So the verger's 
theory is false, or new refinements of royalty have come 
lately into vogue. 

In the farther corner from the chancel is the most 
exquisite monumental group in England, and with but 
few rivals in Europe. It is in memory of Princess 



150 TOWARDS LONDON. 

Charlotte, of much fame forty years ago. A form lies 
on a couch covered with a sheet. One hand only is 
seen depending heavily at its side. Four draped figures 
kneel at the four corners of the couch : the spirit-mother 
is floating up into heaven with her babe in her arms. 
Death was never more powerfully produced than in that 
covered form, revealed, though concealed, under the 
simple covering. The shrouded mourners represented 
the four corners of the globe lamenting the dead, — 
a slightly ambitious conception on which the painful 
naturalness of the central figure has no share. Canova's 
groups at Vienna and Venice, and Michael Angelo's in 
the Medici chapel, are alone superior. 

But the dead cannot domineer too long over the 
living. Leaving the Castle we enter the great Park 
whose gate is close beside that of the Palace. This 
estate spreads out into pasture and forest for nearly four 
thousand acres. A long avenue of three miles, shaded 
with venerable trees, is its favorite drive. Turning away 
from this stately vista, we pass the model farm of Prince 
Albert, and two or three little hamlets, walk through 
wood and dale, mount a long and steep ascent, descend 
by the ever-winding road, and are on the banks of the 
Thames. Five miles' walk across but an edge of the 
demesne gives some conception of its vastness. Passing 
along the banks we see a little island basking in the 
sun ; on the farther side, but a few rods off, the mead 
lies flat and rich and tastefully shaded. These are the 
plains of 

RUNNTMEADE. 

The feudal lords of John, restive under his hand, met 
here and drew up the first English declaration of inde- 
pendence. John invited them to Windsor, but they 
feared to go. He was therefore constrained to go to 
them. The towers of the Castle cannot be seen from 



TOWARDS LONDON. 151 

this valley: the king sullenly leaves its gates, and 
yields with surly rage to their behest. The spot has 
no monument save a questionable slab. It is its own 
monument. Here was born that Habeas Corpus which 
our rebel sympathizers have been so afraid our President 
would destroy ; but which they never struggled to main- 
tain, when the slave power held their victims in their 
grasp, in defiance of both its letter and its spirit. Here too 
was born that not less immortal principle, — trial by jury, 
— a principle whose death our same mourning friends 
have likewise lamented. Not the least of its gifts was 
the curbing of the increasing absolutism of the throne, 
and the inauguration of that dogma which was crowned 
with brief success in the days of Cromwell, and will be 
with yet greater in the days to come. For to restrain 
the crown is of the same nature as to abolish it. These 
pleasant plains have brought forth fruit an hundred- 
fold in this island, in Europe, Australia, and America. 
The proud barons did not mean this ; they only sought 
for their own rights ; and won them for the season. 
Not the least curious of its lessons is this, — that what 
the Magna Charta actually intended to effect has utter- 
ly vanished, notwithstanding its establishment. Its au- 
thors cared but little, if any, for trial by jury, or for 
habeas corpus. They sought solely the continuance of 
feudal power. It was a fight of noble against prince, 
in which the noble conquered and yet failed. Their 
equality has ceased. They are less the lords of the 
realm to-day than the people and the king. He tri- 
umphed against his chiefs only by enlarging the rights 
of the people. The promises of this declaration, long 
an ignored thing, were raised from the dust of ages and 
made the vehicle of life to the masses, and of strength 
to their sovereign. The people will ere long be strong 
enough to do without the king ; and the seed germ of tho 



152 



TOWARDS LONDON, 



great charter, after five hundred years of growth, will 
have become the tree of life to all this realm. 

The station-house of E^ham is near at hand ; and ere 



the afternoon is 
and the world. 



ended I am in the heart of England 








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IX. 



LONDON. 



ITS PLAN. 




HE bells of St. Paul's are striking twelve in 
my ears. The roar of London life, even at 
this midnight hour, keeps up its moan and 
dash, ceaseless as the roar of the great sea, of which it 
is, in some other sad respects, no unfitting type. The 
fashion here is to go to bed late and get up late. Even 
such unworldly places as the Wesleyan Bookstore I 
found with shutters up at nine o'clock in the morning ; 
and nine o'clock, it must be remembered, in this high 
latitude, is six to seven hours after sunrise. So com- 
pletely do they turn day to night and night to day. I will 
try the last, though I cannot afford to indulge in the first 
luxury. 

The first thing that struck me about London was, how 
well I was acquainted with it. When I inquired the 
way to my purposed quarters, the policeman spoke a 
half a dozen familiar names in giving me the direction. 
No city streets in America are half as familiar, nominally, 
as these. Given Broadway, Chesnut, Washington, and 
a few others, and our country youth have got to the 
end of this knowledge. But my first sight of a street- 
sign here was the Strand ; and Dr. Johnson and his 
squib at the new school of poets, whose natural verse 
has washed away all his artificial lines, sprung up in- 
stantly, — 



154 LONDON. 

" I put my hat upon my head, 
And walked into the Strand, 
And there I saw another man, 
With his hat in his hand." 

I did not see the latter sort, unless the blind beggar by 
the wayside represented him ; nor did I see the Grub 
Street whence he issued, unless these many lanes where 
chop-houses abound are the modern interpretation of 
that ancient and somewhat different synonym. Nor yet 
did I see the self-sufficient, lumbering old Doctor, unless 
these men, so portly and rolled up in themselves, were 
of his blood. They certainly are of his nation, for no 
man in English literature so completely embodies the 
ideal Englishman as he. Elegant to elaborateness in 
style ; moral in sentiment ; unmeaningly, but intensely 
devoted to old institutions ; intolerent, self-important, 
always impressed with the conviction that whatever with 
them is, is right, — such was he ; such are they. The 
Strand, into which he entered thus properly equipped — 
for an Englishman would almost as soon be seen without 
his head as without his hat — is a street of fair width, 
and full of life and motion. Move along up and you 
come to Temple Bar, Fleet Street, Ludgate Hill, Pater- 
noster Row, Newgate, St. Paul's Churchyard, Cheapside, 
all familiar as household words. Go the other way a 
short distance, and Charing Cross, Drury Lane, White- 
hall, Westminster, and such old names, in the freshest 
and whitest of paint, salute your eye. Starting from 
St. Paul's and walking a little way down Cheapside, you 
see Threadneedle Street, Old Jewry, Bishop's Gate, 
Lombard Street, Cornhill, looking at you as though they 
alone were immortal. 

One thing about these streets, — we do not expect to see 
them crowded with life. They are historic, romantic, — 
things of the past, of imagination. One would as soon 
expect to meet Hamlet's ghost and Macbeth's witches 
parading them as actual men and women. You look for 



LONDON. 155 

those that have made them yours. When I was passmg the 
Temple on the Thames, I half fancied that the lad Lamb 
was carelessly looking from its pleasant chambers. In 
Threadneedle Street I anxiously sought for Bartholomew 
Lane, and for old Jacob Stock, the money-getting, but 
not money-giving, professor. I did not Jfind the Lane nor 
Jacob, though I presume both are here. The street is 
a fine, stone-faced banking street, one of a dozen that 
wriggle in inextricable confusion around the Exchange, 
Bank of England, and Lord Mayor's mansion. And 
Jacob Stocks undoubtedly abound here as they did of 
yore, and do in America, — men who hide the Lord's 
money in their own selfish napkins. I have seen such 
before I came to London. How is it that Christians 
can be found who thus imperil their souls ? The voice 
of the poor, the voice of the Church, the voice of a per- 
ishing world appeal to them in vain. They may give 
what he would not give, — words ; but God asks not 
these of them. Words he demands of his ministers, who 
have nought else to give. Out of their treasures they 
must give large and ceaseless, if they would enter the 
kingdom of heaven. Let them remember the immense 
difficulty with which Christ says their salvation is se- 
cured, and be careful that their golden fingers, as the 
preacher's golden mouth, are employed in the service 
of the Master. 

But this has not much to do with London ; and still 
it has, for London is the centre of the wealth of the 
world, and but little of its enormous income flows into 
the treasury of the Lord. 

You want a description of the city ? How foolish ! 
Thirty-five hundred streets cut up this bit of land. Im- 
agine any ten miles square thus divided, fill every inch 
with a house, and make each house a hive, and you get 
an idea of the town. Of these streets it may be said, 
in general terms, a few are wide, but most are narrow ; 



156 LONDON, 

a few are straight, but most are crooked ; many are clean ; 
all are paved or macadamized ; and through all, at most 
hours of the day and night, the great stream of life pours 
in innumerable omnibuses, cabs, carriages, carts, and 
a-foot. One is impressed with the spreading out of this* 
stream : it is a lake, a sea of humanity. It seems to go 
everywhere with equal fulness. The coaches are choked 
occasionally in other cities ; here you are compelled to 
wade slowly through throngs, in many centres, miles 
apart. 

At first sight it seems as if it had no centre ; that, 
like space, its circumference is everywhere and centre 
nowhere. But the first motto that impressed itself upon 
my childish brain was in the preface to Colb urn's First 
Lessons, " What man has done man can do." So, as 
man has built, and therefore comprehended London, I 
will try at least to achieve the latter. When one goes 
diligently to work to reduce a tumultous mass, he soon 
finds much that he can eliminate, as well as points 
around which the whole revolves. Our national conflict 
has taught this lesson. So London, which seems a maze 
without a plan, may be as easily subdued by the careful 
tourist as it has been by every conqueror that ever set 
foot on these shores, from C«sar to William of Orange. 
As the mountains of human flesh have no more vital 
organs than ordinary men, so this huge congregation of 
humanity is easily resolvable, and its few essential 
centres easily mapped. 

First, the Thames makes the city. Take a stream 
having the usual moderate windings of a river, a few 
hundred yards wide, or half as wide as Fulton Ferry. 
On the east or right hand-bank, as you ascend it, there 
was once a wooded knoll, coming quite near the river 
for a mile or more, and then stretching on a like low 
elevation far back into the country. Swamps and 
marshes were adjoining the river on both sides of this 



LONDON. 157 

mound. That was the site of London. There is its 
commercial and religious centre. It is called "the City," 
and remains of its ancient walls yet exist. Nearest the 
river is St. Paul's. A half of a mile back and south, 
but on the same level, is the Bank and the Exchange, 
Lombard Street, Cornhill, and other well-known streets, 
where the business, and banking of London have con- 
gregated their wealth, and increased their talents for 
more than two thousand years. Here, too, is the Lord 
Mayor's official residence, and the City or Guild Hall. 
Here, of course, are its jail and cemetery; its retail, 
as well as wholesale streets. So Newgate and Old 
Bailey are within a stone's throw of the Cathedral ; 
the church-yard surrounds it, and Cheapside, retail in 
name and nature, connects it with the Exchange. 

But London is more than a commercial city. From the 
beginning it has been a bribe to freebooters, who sought 
to dignify their robberies by calling themselves kings 
and conquerors. So it has a political, a national centre. 
This heart, which supplies it at once with animal and 
spiritual life, has a head ; and this head, in the course 
of ages, becomes two heads : one ^of power, pure and 
simple ; and one of law and legislation, struggling with 
and ultimately curbing this absolute power. Its centres 
were the Tower and Parliament. These, with the Ca- 
thedral, are the essentials of London. Get these into 
your mind and you get all. They are all on the east 
bank of the river ; for there were no bridges nor ferries 
in those early days. The Tower is at the bottom of the 
hill on which the city was built, about a mile and a half 
on the banks below the Cathedral. It is the southern 
point of old London, and was apparently built there by 
the Conqueror, so that if his enslaved Anglo-Saxons 
should get up an insurrection which he could not sup- 
press, he might have a way of escape back to his robber 
dens and forests of Normandy. But this bragging race, 



158 LONDON. 

tliat here and in America boast that they were not born 
to be slaves, and are very fierce on the poor blacks for 
submitting to that condition for two or three centuries, 
never troubled the Conqueror or his posterity with their 
insurrections, except for a few years under Cromwell. 
So far as they were concerned, his carefulness was un- 
needed, and he and his descendants, soon learning this, 
used the Tower as a palace for themselves and a prison 
for the rivals of their own blood who fought with them 
for the dominion over the tame serfs who now talk so 
ferociously in the columns of the " Times." 

Leaving the Tower for the present undescribed, let 
us get the last and not least of these points d'appuL 
Some narrow and miserable streets connect the Tower 
with the town. They were evidently not intended to 
be connected ; and these lanes along the river, and par- 
allel and above them, are the encroachments of commerce 
and a crowded population. Yet these brief and narrow 
ways have something historic about them. On that close, 
dirty lane that hugs the shore, a little distance from 
the Tower, is Billingsgate, a fish-market on the river. 
I walked through ^it, expecting to hear the language 
which has put a word into our dictionaries, and to see 
manners that should recall Johnson's verbal assault upon 
one of its dames ; but it had only the usual and not 
agreeable odor of a fish-market ; and the few women- 
sellers among the men were respectable in voice and 
manner. 

Parallel with this street, and close above it, on the 
side of the bank, is Eastcheap, made immortal by the 
wit of Shakspeare. It is like the class of streets in 
our home cities near the shipping, — not great enough 
for business, nor good enough for residence ; a second-class 
commercial and third-class lodging street ; evidently the 
very spot for the wild revelries of Hal and FalstafF, 
adjoining the Prince's palace, and yet at the bottom of 



LONDON. 159 

society, where these princes love to dive, though not to 
stay. It is improved somewhat, being chiefly devoted 
to business. 

Passing through these, you reach London Bridge, the 
oldest and lowest down of the bridges. Near it is a 
monument of the great fire of 1666. From there to 
St. Paul's is a straight street, running near the Bank. 
About as far above the Cathedral as the Tower is below 
are Westminster Abbey, Hall, and Parliament, all to- 
gether, all close to the Thames, and all on a low river 
bottom. The street that leads there is comparatively 
wide and superlatively crowded ; and, although undi- 
vided and decently straight, it bears the different and 
most familiar names of Ludgate Hill, Fleet Street, the 
Strand, Charing Cross, and Whitehall. 

This legal and political centre of London and the 
British Empire was selected probably from its proximity 
to the Abbey. Those religious houses were sanctuaries 
of fugitives, whether from the rapacity of tower kings 
or city mobs, but especially from the former ; and law, 
legislative and executive, naturally grew on the spot 
where it found the protection out of which alone it could 
be born. Keeping, then, in your mind, the Tower, St. 
Paul's, Westminster, all on the bank of the Thames, you 
can easily understand the city. Across the bridges is 
the Brooklyn of London, an immense mass of population, 
but nothing more. Here, too, by a strange coincidence, 
is the Beecher of London, Spurgeon's tabernacle being 
on this side of the city. It shows, perhaps, that, as in 
Brooklyn, its population is of the middle class, who are 
the meat on which such popular orators feed. The lordly 
and servile stay the other side of the stream. 

Below the Tower are the docks, — walled squares of 
water, with entrances like locks of canals, — filled with 
ships. Above the Parliament houses are the parks, 
somewhat in from the river. 



160 LONDON. 

Parallel with the streets that lead from London 
Bridge to Westminster, as far as crooked lines can be 
parallel, from a quarter of a mile to a mile behind 
them, is the second great line of thoroughfares ; begin- 
ning, like the first, at the bridge, passing the Bank, and 
then winding back from the river. They are called 
Holborn, Skinner, and Oxford Streets. It comes out on 
the farther side of Hyde and St. James's Parks. In its 
upper part it enters the aristocratic and luxurious portion 
of London. In the neighborhood of Oxford Street are the 
royal and noble palaces, Regent Street, the Parks, Pall 
Mall, Piccadilly, the fashionable London of this century. 
Hither the Tower is transferred, and the dingy gray 
walls of St. James's, or the statelier pile of Buckingham 
confronts the parks, not far from the once-despised, but 
now triumphant St. Stephen's. The Parliament rules 
England, and royalty comes and humbly takes the ap- 
pointed seat within its shadow. Here, too, are the great 
institutions with which wealth has filled this world 
metropolis, — the British Museum, Zoological Gardens, 
Galleries of Art, and the Great Exhibition. Beyond, 
on every side, spread waves on waves of houses, a 
great and wide sea, full of creatures innumerable, both 
small and great beasts. But you have in this space 
— a mile from the river and three miles along its 
eastern bank — the whole of the ancient or modern 
London of which you read, and which so many come 
to see, and so many more desire to see, but will die 
without the sight. 



THE TOWER. 

In giving views of London, it is more difficult to omit 
than to describe. Among so many particulars, which to 
select is a puzzle. Let us take the one that is of chief 
historic interest, — the Tower. 



LOIS DON. 161 

The Tower, as we have said, is at the bottom of a 
moderate hill, which rises up behind it. There is 
nothing attractive in its situation or appearance. There 
are stone walls, such as usually surround a prison : 
inside are other walls, which are built up high and 
pierced occasionally with windows. Inside of these 
house walls is an ugly square stone building, with a 
turret on each corner, as tasteless as a Puritan church 
or cotton factory. This is the original building erected 
by William the Conqueror. His taste was poor, but his 
hand was strong. These walls, fifteen feet thick, show 
this. What does the robber care for beauty? Let his 
descendants attend to that. 

This was a palace and prison for five hundred years, 
and many are the terrible stories these walls would tell 
did they but ope their marble jaws. Most of them are 
unrecorded. The earliest victims died and made no 
sign. It was only in the last struggles of absolute 
monarchy in England that its history finds utterance. 
Within three generations, or a hundred years, is most 
of its public life embraced. Richard the Third smoth- 
ering the babes here, was killed by Elizabeth's grand- 
father. Sir Walter Raleigh was killed by her successor. 
It has bloody records almost to our day, and far back in 
the elder centuries ; but all that the guides talk about, 
and nearly all you think about, is in that brief space 
of its history. 

Enter the outer gate, go along a short, narrow passage 
between the outer and inner walls, and you come to an 
old gate opening to the water. Opposite is the entrance 
to the area of the Tower. That water-gate is called 
the Traitor's Gate, for here all prisoners of state were 
brought in barges, and hence transferred to their dun- 
geons. 

Over the inner gate, opposite the Traitor's, and about 
twenty-five feet from the ground, is a small lattice win- 

H 



162 LONDON. 

dow swinging outward. It opens on a narrow entry, 
and on the opposite side of the entry from the outer 
window is a smaller one, lighting a ten foot square 
bedroom, very plain and cheap. This is the spot where 
the child king and his brother were murdered. Along 
that entry came their murderers, holding such conversa- 
tion in their hearts, if not with their lips, as Shakspeare 
puts into their mouths. At its farther end, their uncle 
— for he was a resident of the Tower — waited for the 
welcome news that he was king of England. Down 
the staircase, close to where we entered, they bare the 
dead children, happily delivered from the miseries that 
then and now hedge in a crown. Not till two hun- 
dred years after are their bones discovered. A plaintive 
inscription of Charles the Second's on a marble urn in 
Westminster shows where they now lie. 

Nothing can be less romantic than this spot. A 
dirtyish woman lives in the chambers below, which 
Queen Mary once occupied, and takes us up the steep, 
narrow stone stairs a few feet to the sad bedroom. You 
have to thrust yourself out of the present into the past, 
shut your eyes of sense and open those of memory and 
fancy, and then the dark and bloody picture rises before 
you. 

Pass into the area. It is a space between William's 
tower and a high prison built near the walls, about a 
hundred feet square. In the centre, on the pavement, is 
a small brass plate, saying that here Anne Boleyn was 
beheaded in 1536. Here, too, fell others, from their high 
estate ; Lady Jane Grey, Sir Thomas More, Catherine 
Howard, and nobody knows how many more. A small, 
low chapel, built in the twelfth century, is on the east 
side of the area. In its vaults it is said more than fifty 
headless bodies moulder. Bodies of the great were 
these ; the ignoble vulgar had no such burial granted 
them. I entered the homely chapel. There are no monu- 



LONDON. 163 

ments, tablets or other memorials of these mighty slain. 
Lady Jane Grey and her husband, Anne Boleyn, and 
all, lie unhonored and unsung. The stately Abbey, with 
its splendid mausoleums and crowds of admirers, is not 
theirs. Very rarely does any visitor enter the church, 
for nothing draws them but memory. Yet the names 
of these unrecorded, mutilated forms are on the tongues 
and in the hearts of men more than all their murderers. 
Mr. Melville preaches here alternately with St. Paul's. I 
hoped to have heard him : but his health is feeble and 
he speaks but seldom now ; so I lost the strange conjunc- 
tion of one of the most eloquent of England's preachers 
standing over the headless dust of some of the greatest 
of her heroes. 

They show you the cell where Sir Walter Raleigh 
was confined, and his library case, whence he drew his 
material for his History of England. The case was 
elegant, but the dungeon dark and narrow. He was 
buried in a church close to the Abbey, at the other end 
of the town. It was no irreverent feeling that arose 
within me as I saw the sacrament administered over the 
vault where he lies, and thought how he was permitted 
in his measure to contribute to the filling up of that 
which remaineth behind of the afflictions of Christ. All 
His witnesses, by their endurance of persecutions for His 
name, are partakers of His sufferings as well as of the 
glory that follows. 

If we should leave this spot without talking of the 
crown jewels and armories, some of you would be dis- 
appointed. But the latter is only a vast collection of 
armor of various ages and styles, and the former a small 
pile of gold and jewels. Crowns look very baubleish, 
— a bit of red velvet, made like a workman's paper 
cap, with some white and colored stones stuck on it. 
They cost immensely. The Queen's, being a new one, 
cost 15,000,000. Yet the whole system of royalty costs 



164 LONDON. 

immensely, and, like these symbols, is "wasteful and 
ridiculdtis excess." There are a half a dozen of these 
crowns, some kings getting up new ones, and others 
using the old, according to fancy. State swords, a gold 
baptismal font for the royal family, and a few other gold 
knicknacks, comprise " the pile." Anne Boleyn's little 
crown and sceptre are here. She seems to have made 
the most of her brief day of glory. Those who ruled 
longer, and died in beds, have long been with her, where 
earthly sceptres and crowns are not of much avail. 

We heard some evidences of the democratic work 
America is achieving even in the Tower and among its 
bedizened protectors. Conversing with two of the sub- 
ordinate officers on our and their affairs, I found they 
were very free to talk of the cost of the royal establish- 
ment, and congratulated me on our deliverance from that 
incumbrance. They even surpassed me in irreverence. 
I suggested that we worked on a cheaper plan than 
they, our Secretary of State having only £2000, theirs 
£12000. " Yes," ^hey replied, " but that is nothing to 
what the Royal family receive." The bayonets are be- 
ginning to think here. Those who sit so serenely upon 
them may well begin to think also. 



WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 

It would be unpardonable for a London sight-seer to 
omit the Abbey from his portfolio. Described by every 
tourist in the past, it must submit to the like fate from all 
that are to come. Like a great man whom every daguer- 
rian and more ambitious painter seek to transfer to their 
canvas of glass or cloth, and who quietly falls into posi- 
tion at the first suggestion of his solicitor, the Abbey sub- 
mits its old, crumbling, gray walls without, — its tombs, 
statues, and greatness within, to the unceasing attentions 
of its untiring visitors. It is the centre to which every 



LONDON. 165 

eye that longs to visit London reverently turns. It re- 
pays the reverence by its contents no less than by itself, 
though after one has seen the great cathedrals he is not 
overwhelmed by the proportions of the Abbey. We get 
fastidious very rapidly. What would be a source of 
constant veneration and a joy forever in America, is 
looked upon as quite commonplace here. Five hundred 
years of age and five hundred feet of length, are the 
sine quihus non of our "parvenu approval. The abbey 
has the first and St. Paul's the last, so that between 
them both they make up a first-class church. 

But it is not the size of Westminster that we think 
of as we uncover our heads beneath its embowered 
roof. It is not its antiquity, gray and reverend as this 
is ; it is the human dust it holds in its protection. How 
foolish seem all the cavillers to the Bible doctrine of 
physical resurrection beside the powerful and univer- 
sal attraction of these grains of noted dust ! I have no 
doubt Swedenborg falsified his theory when in London 
by reverently visiting these cast-off clothes, which he 
afl^med were never to be resumed. The Tower con- 
tains the veritable garments. How little is the effect 
that the sight of them creates beside that with which 
these unseen ashes sway us ! These sceptred spirits rule 
us from their urns. The tombs of the former kings vary 
greatly in magnificence ; but for several centuries they 
have ceased to build them. The last tomb is that of 
Elizabeth and Mary, who sleep together as lovingly in 
their last as they undoubtedly did in many of their first 
slumbers. A plain gray stone, with the name of the 
monarch, is the only monument, and even this does not 
> usually exist. Henry VIII. is thus entombed at the 
Hoyal Chapel of Windsor ; so are some of the earlier 
kings. George II., Charles II., William and Mary, 
Anne, and others lie here in vaults as unrecorded as 
the humblest dead in the humblest church-yard. 



166 LONDON. 

This course is far more impressive than the gaudy pile 
of mouldering marble. It recognizes the equal stroke 
of pale death, and by its confession of his democratic 
sovereignty almost wins from us a momentary regard for 
the intense seclusiveness of their earthly state. 

The Abbey is crowded with monuments, tablets, statues ; 
yet but few are of persons of present fame. This grand 
display of names, titles, and deeds that have completely 
vanished from the knowledge of men, when once they 
seemed so enduring as to need no marble record, is an- 
other of the sad, yet profitable suggestions that such 
sights impart. Our pride, ambition, vanity of wealth or 
fame can have ample opportunity to cool their hot lusts 
among these marble shadows of once exalted shades. 

Another thing that mars the power of this place is, 
that you do not know which are mere memorials and 
which cover the real man. In the Poet's Corner, for 
instance, I know that Milton, Gray, and Shakspeare do 
not sleep, but I do not know whether Addison, Ben Jon- 
son, and many others are absent also ; and hence doubt, 
the greatest hinderance of devotion, disturbs us with her 
presence. I suspect that most of these are only ceno- 
taphs, erected after death and time had made them fit to 
enter this aristocratic cemetery. Under Addison's tablet, 
afl&xed to the wall, is a plain gray slab in the floor with 
" Thomas Babington, Lord Macaulay," upon it. Here 
we stand and feel that awe which the bed of death imparts 
when occupied by one of extraordinary genius. Statues 
of Peel, of Watt, of other celebrities fill the place ; but 
with the embarrassment upon us of which we have 
spoken, we could look at them only as works of art, and 
not feel the power of actual dust. It seems as if such 
dust had the power of Elisha's body, and, though dead, 
can fill with new life those with whom it comes in 
contact. 

The most venerable chapel is that of Edward the 



LONDON. 167 

Confessor. Last but one of the Saxon kings, and dying 
only nine months before the invasion of the Norman 
founder of the present dynasty, he escaped beholding the 
subjugation of his people to a foreign yoke. How proud 
the English nation would be if they could trace their 
royal blood back to Alfred, and Arthur, and Edwin of 
York, and Ethelbert of Kent. But these, the names 
they are proudest of in their history, are represented 
only in the untitled commoners and laborers of the land. 
It is well that one, and the only crowned one of their 
blood, should sleep among those who usurped his honors. 
Beside him are the tombs of the Norman kings, Edward 
I. and Henry V., and their families. None so high and 
lifted up but may learn from his family the coming hour 
when they shall be but commoners, and all these distinc- 
tions be as much forgotten among the living as they are 
among the dead. 

On its walls are two tablets from the American Col- 
onies, and only two ; and curiously enough they are from 
South Carolina and Massachusetts ; and yet more curious, 
though natural, is their purport. The South Carolina 
tablet commemorates one William Wragge, who was a 
Tory in the Revolution, and fleeing to England, was 
drowned on the way. The Massachusetts one is to the 
memory of General Howe, who fell at Ticonderoga, in 
the French and Indian War. It is put in the stately 
style which she even then, more than any British colony 
before or since, had adopted. " By order," it reads, " of 
the Great and General Court of the Province of Mas- 
sachusetts Bay, New England," etc. How striking the 
contrast of these two States then. How striking now. 

ST. PAULAS 

is the eastern, as the Abbey is the western, religious focus 
of real London. The Cathedral towers over the seats 
of trade. It shows how nearly religion and business 



168 LONDON. 

were once connected, and by its separation from most of 
the churches, how far they are now apart. The mighty 
mass grows upon one dwelling daily beneath its shadow. 
It would be a sublime structure were it washed of its 
filthy garments and set in a spacious park ; but smoke 
blackens most of its surface, and houses close it in on 
every side, leaving a few feet begrudgingly to old graves. 
It is thus impossible to get a fair view of its proportions. 
Only the dome swells above the surrounding roofs and 
compels admiration. The French visitants to the Ex- 
hibition wittily sneered at its begrimed marble columns 
and surface, and carry their sneer into its architecture, 
saying " It looks as if built by chimney-sweeps for 
chimney-sweeps." But the jest goes too far. Nothing in 
Paris is as sublime in architecture. The Pantheon alone 
approximates its grandeur. Within, tawdry masses of 
marble and tawdrier verbiage of laudation upon them, 
illustrate the degeneracy of man in his highest estate. 
Every costly monument is to forgotten vanity, — except 
statues of Johnson and Turner. Its vastness, like the 
cathedrals in country hamlets, is beyond the needs of the 
metropolis, and only a fragment of its immensity is occu- 
pied with the crowds of daily worshippers. 

OTHER CHURCHES. 

There are none eminent save these. Costly, but not 
grand, are some ; cheap and indifferent most. Yet they 
are costly beside those of the dissenting bodies. All the 
stately and steepled churches are confined to the Estab- 
lishment. 

There is not a grand church belonging to any dis- 
senting body. Even the Roman Catholics worship in 
obscure, towerless chapels. Nothing shows more com- 
pletely the greatness of the warfare against this church, 
or the completeness of the victory. Twenty miles across 
the Channel and all the glories of religious architecture 



LONDON. 169 

are in her hands. Here not a vestige of it do they 
possess. It makes one almost commend that rough 
rascal, Bluff Harry. We see how only such an icono- 
clast could effect such a work. It took a hundred and 
fifty years to complete the work he begun : six genera- 
tions of ceaseless strife before the Papist submitted to his 
fate. ^ 

We also see how in such a work Protestant equality 
could not get recognized. The nation was under relig- 
ious martial law, and no liberties of dissent could be 
allowed to approvers of the general principles of the 
faith any more than to its bitter enemies. It was then 
engaged in a rebellion against the mightiest power in the 
earth, — a power which sought to reestablish itself by 
gunpowder plots, by foreign interventions, continued for 
over two centuries, from Spain with her Armada and 
France aiding Mary of Scotland against Elizabeth, to 
James against William, and the Pretender against the 
Georges ; by fostering civil wars, and by every conceiv- 
able and diabolical effort. They said, "We must be united 
against this foe. We can allow no distraction among 
ourselves which this subtle and mighty enemy will turn 
to his profit and our destruction." They reasoned hu- 
manly, if not divinely ; and the liberty of the dissenters 
to-day may be owing to the suppression of that liberty 
in the height of the conflict. 

It is time now that this domination should cease. 
The other churches of Christ ought to put up churches 
which are churches. They should be built like those of 
the Established order. They would be a most powerful 
argument of their real equality. The Wesleyans are 
taking this judicious step. I heard Punshon in a fine 
Gothic edifice in Highbury that looked like a church 
and not a chapel. They have others, I understand, of 
superior beauty. 



170 LONDON. 

THE PREACHERS. 

If the national Church can boast of the best buildings, 
the independent bodies can boast of the best preachers. 
After especial and frequent inquiry I could not hear of 
one celebrated preacher in all these exclusive churches. 
I ought to except Dr. M'Call, who was spoken well of 
by one or two of the officers of the Tower. But his 
church was in their vicinity, and I could not learn that 
his fame had got beyond that neighborhood. Mr. Mel- 
ville is feeble with age, and preaches but seldom. All 
the live, drawing, working men seem to have freed them- 
selves from the State Church, which, in its effects on its 
clergy, is but a State Prison. I judged from the many 
handbills announcing special sermons by incumbents of 
these Established churches that they were not idle ; but 
I could not hear that any stood out marked and powerful 
as a preacher of the Word. 

Trench, then Dean of Westminster, frequently preached 
at the Abbey. This elegant scholar has but httle ap- 
pearance of elegance in his address. He is a large- 
framed man, above the middle height, with large fea- 
tures, and a coarse bushy head of hair. His voice is 
harsh, and his manners boisterous, — the very opposite 
of what one would have expected from his writings. 
But he was intensely in earnest. He seemed tied down 
by his notes, and struggled as a lion in a net between 
his parchment and his gown. His subject was Ezekiel's 
vision, having reference to Whit-Sunday, or the day of 
Pentecost. His language had his usual force, finish, and 
sincerity. He impressed me as being greatly burdened 
for souls. He is said to be an indefatigable worker, and 
the crowds drawn to the Abbey could not have been 
more faithfully dealt with. 

By rare fortmie I heard Dr. Cumming that same 
evening on the same text : there the similitude ended. 



LONDON. 171 

In matter, manner, everything except the unity of the 
Spirit, they are totally unlike. The Doctor is tallish, 
slim, very genteel, nice to softness in voice and man- 
ner, — pronouncing exquisite, " exsqueeseete," and such- 
like Miss Nancy-isms. Yet the dandy glove hides a 
grip of steel. He, more than any one I have heard, 
discussed doctrinal questions. This was probably owing 
to his Scotch training and auditory. He referred to the 
" Essays and Reviews," denouncing them for their laxity 
on the question of inspiration. His subject was the 
universal triumph of Christ. His millenarian views 
were dwelt upon, and prophecies repeated. 

The conduct of France and Russia in refusing to aid 
the Sultan in restoring the Holy Sepulchre showed that 
they intended to wrest it from him, and he declared that 
this would soon merge into a religious and universal 
war. Its peaceable settlement embarrasses his prophecy. 
He had some neat and novel thoughts, and some fine 
touches of eloquence. He is very easy to hear, being 
purely conversational ; with no scrap of paper, but only 
fervid talk. I was not surprised at his popularity. 
Even that very tendre would increase his attractiveness. 
Two thousand persons were in his amphitheatre of a 
church. 

Messrs. Landell and Brock, Baptist preachers, are 
very unlike in themselves, and probably in the sphere of 
their popularity. Mr. Brock is a thorough-going Eng- 
lishman ; stout, sturdy, honest, simple-hearted, striking 
easy and instantly at the conscience of his hearer. He 
is just the man for a mass meeting ; with no assumption, 
no fine phrases, yet easy, off"-hand, apparently inexhausti- 
ble ; he is made for the crowd, and knows it. His ser- 
mon on " Behold mine elect whom I have chosen," was 
earnest and affectionate. 

Mr. Landell is an aristocratic preacher of an aristo- 
cratic church. His chapel looks like a dwelling-house 



172 LONDON. 

outside, but is tasty and even handsome within ; though 
being built, as most are, in a semicircle, with enormous 
galleries covering half the house, it is far from being a 
gem of architecture. He is very British in his pronun- 
ciation, the most so of any one I have heard. His 
sermon was on " Be ye steadfast," etc. Like nearly all 
that I have heard, it was purely textual. Each word 
and thought was a theme for plain and often choice 
comment and vigorous application. The successive steps 
of a Christian life were set forth, and the incentives to 
faithfulness. 

Newman Hall, the successor of Rowland Hill, is the 
most zealous one that I have seen, except Spurgeon. 
He is about forty, dark, with dark eyes, very pleasant 
voice, and a very impassioned manner. Like Mr. Brock, 
he evidently feels 

" 'Tis all my business here below 
To cry, * Behold the Lamb ' ! " 

He leans over the pulpit in the most entreating manner, 
and sets forth the richness of the Gospel promises and 
the necessity of embracing them. There was a total 
absence of formal sermonizing, though he had his manu- 
script before him. It was only an easy, eloquent, in- 
tense exhortation. 

Richard Weaver I heard in the Tottenham Court 
Chapel, built by "Whitefield. He is an oddity, a minis- 
terial vagrant. The house was crowded almost after the 
Whitefield fashion. He is much Hke the eccentricities 
which fly off from every church, and feel themselves 
greater than all their brethren. Men and boys were 
round the doors, hawking his sermons, songs, and por- 
trait, while he was busy within in describing, with great 
vigor of gesture and but little vigor of thought, his 
experience and his labors. I should judge him to be 
well meaning but unregulated. He has power with the 



LONDON. 173 

masses, as out of them he has just come, being a con- 
verted and still uneducated collier. It is not impossible 
that he may be at his appointed work, for a great mul- 
titude of poor people hung upon his lips that night with 
the most intense interest. The Lord has many kinds 
of works to be done in His vineyard, and it is not for 
us to criticise the services to which some are put. 

After all, London fame settles on two men, Punshon 
and Spurgeon. Arthur would divide the honors with 
Punshon were he well. I have heard no sermon more 
tender and fervent in spirit, more neat, concise, yet rich 
in thought, than one I had the pleasure of hearing from 
him on " I beheld, and lo, a Lamb in the midst of the 
throne, as it had been slain." From these words, with 
great skill, he led us step by step along the highway of 
the Gospel. He seemed feeble, but showed what power 
was his in his better days. 

Punshon and Spurgeon are very different sort of men. 
Punshon reminded me of Bascom and Chapin. He 
reads fast, has but few gestures, is no orator, at least in 
the pulpit, and carries his crowds by the splendor of his 
language more than by all other gifts. He rushes with 
such impetuosity that you are swept along as in an 
express train. His subject was Jeremiah's complaint 
against the Jews for abandoning the living fountains and 
hewing out to themselves cisterns, broken cisterns, that 
can hold no water. Like the others, it was textual, seiz- 
ing each word and showing its force and application ; ad- 
dressed to the unconverted persons of a Christian nation. 
He enlarged on the difference between the work Jere- 
miah and Paul had to do, — one to warn, entreat, and 
lament a falling Church, the other to build up the Church 
out of the ruins of heathendom. His description of the 
Jews was masterly. So was his portrayal of the labor 
of man to save himself: hewing out to himself cisterns, 
broken cisterns, that can hold no water. His sermons 



174 LONDON. 

are exegetical orations. His house was full, and were 
it known where he preached, the crowds would be 
enormous. He ought to be advertised, unless he could 
have a stated place, which the Wesleyan polity forbids. 
He is a large, full-faced man, of about forty. His voice 
is pleasant, but not extraordinary. His forte is in these 
rushing tides of gorgeous rhetoric, not overflowing, but 
full to the brim. Reading his sermon spoils it for oratory, 
but does not seem to conflict with his style, which might 
not be helped but marred by abandoning the manuscript. 
He may break away from these inky letters on the plat- 
form ; if so, his sweep must be grand. 

But the pulpit orator of London is Spurgeon. I con- 
fess to a previous prejudice against him ; but he disarmed 
me. I heard him twice ; and though I dislike to admit 
any one into the circle where my three greatest preach- 
ers dwell, — Olin, Durbin, and Beecher, — yet I have to 
acknowledge he has a seat beside if not above them. He 
has none of the purely rhetorical manners of Punshon, 
and yet he has its results. He is a very remarkable 
man; the greatest preacher, I think, that I have ever 
heard. Let me try to give you some idea of him. First, 
behold the field of his conflicts and victories. This is a 
handsome theatre, — two galleries going entirely around 
the house. In front of the first gallery, on a line with 
it, projects a platform, enclosed by common altar railing. 
This is his pulpit. Half way between it and the lower 
floor is a platform, in the front of the pulpit, full of 
singers. He opens the meeting with animating singing, 
then makes running, witty, and spiritual comments on 
his Scripture readings. He begins his sermon by im- 
ploring the presence of the Holy Spirit, and through 
every word and moment this seems uppermost in his 
thoughts. He is very dramatic, delighting to hold im- 
aginary conversations with persons in the house. The 
night I heard him he fancied himself preaching one of 



LONDON. 175 

Paul's sermons in the streets of Corinth, to show what 
the apostolic preaching was, and for fifteen minutes had 
entirely forgotten that he was aught else than the fervent 
Apostle. He refers to the current heresies of the day, 
and annihilates them with a blow. He made light of 
systems of divinity, so called, declaring their idea impos- 
sible and their wisdom foolishness. Then he answered 
objectors. This is a good specimen of the quickness of 
his repartee. " A class object to the Atonement because 
it is so bloody. It smells of the shambles. ' Of course it 
does,' he exclaimed. ' He shall be led as an ox to the 
shambles.' " These words give no idea of the vehemence 
with which he leaps on his antagonists. He was very 
positive in his Calvinism. Yet, holding an animated 
dialogue with an inquirer in the gallery, he makes him 
ask : " How do I know that I may be saved ? " " Do 
you trust Him ? " he exclaims. " If you do, you are one 
of those who are bought with His blood ; and adroit 
answer, though far from the demands of his system. 

He glories in the simplicity of his preaching, and 
seems to think that he is nothing remarkable, but only 
an earnest, straightforward evangelist, who stands before 

sinners, 

" With cries, entreaties, tears, to save 
And snatch them from a burning grave." 

He differs from all great preachers that I have ever 
heard in this singleness of aim. His every sermon is a 
battle, begun with a charge of bayonets. His voice is 
strong and pleasant, except that it breaks on the high 
notes. He is the perfection of English preaching, em- 
bodying in their finest expression all the leading pecu- 
liarities of that school. They are less disputatious than 
the Scotch or American. They are averse to mere 
rhetoric, or anything which seems to savor of it. I 
think they would condemn some of Beecher's gorgeous 
word-paintings for this reason. Punshon comes nearest 



176 LONDON. 

to us, and yet is pure English ; his rushing language 
being only enforcements of the lessons of the text. 

I cannot call this style superior or equal to the Amer- 
ican. Ours recognizes intellectual activities in the minds 
of our auditors ; skepticisms, discussions, difficulties, which 
their spiritual guides must discourse upon. This preach- 
ing does not seem to know that there is any conflict of 
mind in England. It is evident from its character that 
the mass of hearers are orthodox, and their aim is almost 
entirely to make them reduce their faith to practice. 
The skeptical fever has reached the upper classes here. 
It will reach the masses when they shall become in- 
telligent and thoughtful. Meantime the preachers and 
preaching in both England and America are msely 
adapted to the peculiar needs of each region. Each 
shall bring forth their appointed work with shoutings, 
and Christ be all in all. 





X. 



A NIGHT IK PARLIAMENT. 




see a battle you must take your station betimes, 
and wait patiently the tedious movements of the 
mustering squadrons. So to witness a field-night 
in the House of Commons, you must be at your post in 
the morning. The house opens at four, and yet at eleven 
in the forenoon I seated myself in a dark den on the low- 
est story of the building, waiting with what patience I 
could command the slowly moving hours. The reason for 
such necessity was, that night an important debate came 
off, and the six hundred members may have each given 
two tickets to a gallery that will not hold a hundred. 
The gallery is very democratic, however otherwise may 
be the House ; and its law is, first come first served. So 
seated in the order of our entrance, we smile condescend- 
ingly at any subsequent Dukes and Earls, as we may 
fancy these latter comers to be, and appreciate the emo- 
tions of Madam Blaze, of whom her biographer. Gold- 
smith, declares, with that simple adhesion to truth that 
ever characterizes him, — 

" The king himself hath followed her, 
* When she hath gone before." 

The nobility slowly gather, proving by their rareness 
their gentility; so that if twelve hundred tickets were 
issued, not one hundred had assembled before the ap- 
pointed hour, and our feverishness, as elsewhere, was 
12 



178 A NIGHT IN PARLIAMENT. 

proved to be foolisliness. The hour comes and the 
blue-coated guide leads us up a series of back, winding, 
and narrow stairs, and ushers us in a high narrow box 
stuck up under the eaves of an arched and Gothic 
roof. How different is the entrance to the galleries of 
the American House of Commons, and how different the 
galleries themselves. The most superb staircase in the 
world, lined with sumptuous marbles and adorned ^with 
the highest art of the painter, opens into a spacious amphi- 
theatre, where three thousand of the nation's rulers may 
witness the deliberations or excitements (usually the 
latter) of their representative subjects. Here a crooked 
and perverse stairway leads to a close and crowded loft. 
Yet this, as that, aptly typifies the relations each body 
holds to its peoples. 

But our eyes are not intent on our quarters. A man 
might perch himself on a chimney-top, and endure its 
choking smoke, were the pageant below sufficiently attrac- 
tive. At least he would admire and observe, not his 
perilous and cloudy post, but the sight he sought to see. 
So turn your eyes away from these high-backed, high- 
breasted pews, and let them sweep the scene below. 

Two houses are objects of your study, — the building, 
the body. The first may be studied first, as the last 
is not yet organized. It is a narrow room, whose height 
is its chief feature. Its length may be seventy feet, its 
width forty, its height forty : yet for these figures we 
vouch not, our eye being anything but mathematical. 
Its impression was that of smallness and crowdedness. 
It was profusely wrought in oak, every inch being covered 
with carving. A gallery ran around it below where we 
sat, narrow, and set stiffly against the wall. There was a 
space through the centre of the floor some ten or fifteen 
feet wide, a portion of which was occupied by the 
Speaker's chair with the Clerk's tables before it. The 
chair was a cathedral seat, with a back ten feet high, 



A NIGHT IN PARLIAMENT. 179 

erect and graceless in the extreme. Perched in this box, 
with his stiff wig and stiffer ways, the Speaker seemed the 
most comfortless of unfortunates. On either side, and in 
front of the space and the chair, rose the benches of the 
members, four or five deep, oaken, and cushioned with 
green leather. 

Opposite to us, above the gallery that was behind 
the Speaker's chair, I saw an ornamental lattice work, 
such as sometimes covers the front of city organs. Be- 
hind it I discovered a fluttering, such as is not usually 
seen behind those cages. Was it an aviary of rare birds 
that waved their gUttering plumage behind those bars ? 
Or were fiercer, though not less beautiful creatures, the 
panther and his family, pacing up and down there? 
After much study, I ascertained that they were ladies ; 
how near my guesses came to the fact others may judge. 
Their imprisonment staggered me. Were they penned 
there for the delectation of the noisy members below, or 
that their eyes might rain sweet influences upon the fiery 
combatants. If the latter, the rain would be greatly 
impeded by the cloudy bars that enclose them. Of what 
was this the curious relic? Of Eastern worship, where 
women do not yet presume to appear in the presence of 
men ? Certainly it is not the reproduction of the tourna- 
ment, of which the scene below might be considered the 
lineal heir. In those lists she sat the arbiter and inspirer, 
as she does to-day at the Derby and other national race- 
grounds. 

While perplexing myself with this problem, a cry was 
heard: the sauntering members who had been ^lowly 
dropping in, arose in their seats; the pompous beadle, 
probably owning some far loftier title, strode into view ; 
the gold mace — a large club of gold — was borne before 
him on a velvet cushion, — a suggester, to my fancy, of 
the original mode of settling disputed questions, and of 
the possible solution to which they may yet come ; and 



180 A NIGHT IN PARLIAMENT. 

behind it walked the bewigged and begowned Speaker, 
tall and stately, with the obsequious clerks concluding 
the procession. 

He mounts his perilous perch, the records are mura- 
blingly read, and the usual droning of such sessions 
is gone through. The expected fight soon opens. The 
government is assailed for extravagance of expenditure, 
— the usual resort of the outs to oust the ins where no 
principles are involved for which either party dare to 
contend. Such were the long and meaningless quarrels 
on which our Websters and Clays in that former genera- 
tion (how long ago it seems) frittered away their genius 
and their lives. 

The officials of the government are seated on the low- 
est bench, on the right of the Speaker ; the leaders of 
the opposition on the opposite bench ; the liberal leaders 
across the lower end of this parallelogram, " below the 
gangway," as it is called. The mastiffs from the oppos- 
ing benches carelessly eye each other. The upper dog 
in the fight soon proceeds to open the fray. There he sits, 
with his hat pressed down over his eyes, his smallish 
form looking as if shrunk with age, his air that of one 
half asleep and half dead. Suddenly he arouses himself, 
rises in an utterly indifferent and lazy manner, and with 
the hesitating tongue which is the sine qua non of par- 
liamentary oratory, throws a bombshell into the ranks 
of his foes. He declares that the question in debate is 
confidence or no confidence in the ministry ; if defeated, 
he shall resign and appeal to the country. They are 
seemingly, perhaps really, taken aback by the threat ; 
and much preliminary skirmishing follows. He knows 
his ground, evidently, and has chosen it with wise fore- 
cast : he is not to be beguiled from it. Even DTsraeli's 
cunning suggestions do not make the craftier fox drop 
his prey. The debate opens with a somewhat graceful 
speech from the author of the motion, Mr. Stanstead, 



A NIGHT IN PARLIAMENT. 181 

the one afterwards expelled from the Cabinet for his 
connection with Garibaldi. Palmerston follows. The 
powers of the man are coolness and readiness His sang 
froid is extraordinary even in a Briton. It is not the 
coolness of a fluent orator, for he is anything but fluent. 
It is not the sparkling jets of a ready debater, though 
in these he is not lacking. It is simply the imperturb- 
ability of the man of business, prepared for every emer- 
gency that his antagonists can create. He is not merely 
cool ; he is adroit. He knows what to say and what 
not to say ; how to conceal a thought while seeming to 
express it. He can utter a biting gibe that is itself a 
clinching argument. And this so carelessly that he ap- 
pt ^s to be the most indifferent person in all the melee. 
His friends and foes grow nervous beside his unchanging 
calmness. " What 's the overthrow of my administra- 
tion ? " he seems to say. " Mere bagatelle." Others say, 
" It is infamous ! it is glorious ! " he, " It is naught ; it 
is naught." 

This is the crowning gift of potentates in all spheres, 
— poetic, oratorio, military, administrative. The cool- 
ness of Phillips, Grant, and Lincoln, are among the 
highest proofs of their greatness. So is that of Palmer- 
ston. Virgil's axiom does not fit his case : Possunt quia 
posse videntur. He is able because he does not seem to 
be able. 

( To him DTsraeli makes reply. Opposite him, not 
twenty feet off, sat the calmly sneering Jew. He is 
dressed with studious care, in " an inky suit of customary 
black," in striking contrast to the seedy slouchiness of 
his rival. His dark face, large and hooked nose, and 
snaky black eye, all mark his race and nature. He 
essays a like abandon; but with him the seeming is 
evident to every eye. His voice is calm, his enunciation 
measured ; he even stammers in his utterance. Yet all 
these are clearly histrionic ; his calmness, extemporaneous- 



182 A NIGHT IN PARLIAMENT. 

ness, and hesitation, are all assumed. He is manifestly 
excited. Every nerve is strained to throw his quiet old 
enemy who has dropped back into his seat, with his hat 
over his eyes, almost nodding, as if asleep. His speech 
is carefully elaborated : there is not a word that has not 
been hammered out with assiduous toil on the studio 
anvil. The natural hesitation of one looking for words 
wherewith to dress the poor naked idea that stands shiver- 
ing in his brain, is the popular style of parliamentary ora- 
tory, because that parliament was not originally intended 
as a congress of representatives and debaters, but a talk- 
ing place of the chiefs of the realm. This is the proper 
meaning of its name ; this the yet distinguishing trait of 
the higher and originally the only house. They disdain 
to make speeches ; they only talk. Hence, as 

" When we stick on conversation's burrs, 
"We strew our pathway with those dreadful 'urrs; " 

SO these gentry, in their parliamentary converse, de- 
light to retain this reminiscence of the earlier colloquial- 
ity that marked their deliberations. DTsraeli knows 
this is the fashion, and strews the pathway of his oratory 
with these suggestions of an unprepared and half em- 
barrassed state of mind, while they are as carefully pre- 
meditated and prearranged as are his most sarcastic or 
ornate passages. 

There is the cold, metallic ring of the memoriter about 
his voice. Its tones resemble Mr. Everett's ; so much 
so, that, were you not looking at him, you would affirm 
that our classic orator was alive. There is one marked 
difference : DTsraeli has an undertone of Mephistophilian 
sneering running through all his speech. It sounds al- 
most demoniacal ; so constant, so intense is the scorn. 
Everett was utterly free from all such bitterness of spirit 
and of tone. He thrusts home with masterly sharpness 
and brightness, piercing always the joints of his enemy's 
harness. How Palmerston can sit so drowsily under 



A NIGHT IN PARLIAMENT. 183 

this stinging sarcasm is marvellous. He hears eveiy 
word ; he feels every word ; yet he sleeps on. This 
Macbeth cannot murder his sleep. That it hits, his 
replies show. Yet in his replies he still keeps the 
merry side out, and plants his blows in laughter, making 
the house ring and his foe writhe at his telling blows. 

Horseman, Bernal Osborne, Lord Stanley, son of the 
Earl of Derby, and Mr. Walpole, a descendant of the 
famed Sir Robert, all engage in the fray. The last is 
a plain-mannered, plain-speeched, middle-aged, common- 
place gentleman. Stanley is young, voluble, and graceful. 
Osborne is bright, saucy, and shallow ; a small specimen 
of Palmerston. Horseman is dark, deep, and venomous ; 
a not small specimen of DTsraeli. He is unsuccessful 
and unpopular, and so the bile floods his words with 
bitterness ; but he is able, and if he were inspired with 
grand aims would be masterly. 

Cobden and Bright are both caught in the storm. 
Never more will they contend together. No wonder 
Bright wept so profusely at his grave. They were of 
one soul. Cobden was portly and somewhat heavy, with 
massive features, a solemn and solid voice, and a digni- 
fied, but somewhat labored manner. Bright is the easi- 
est and most fascinating speaker of them all. The words 
flow trippingly from his tongue. He is not unlike Phil- 
lips, in his ease of manner and of language. He is of 
light complexion, full countenance, a large, but easy mo- 
tioned body, a silvery voice ; a readiness, fullness, and, 
above all, frankness, that no other save Cobden exhibited. 
The twain were the New England of Old England in 
their principles ; hardly less in their style and address. 
Cobden had but little of the old regime stuttering; 
Bright, none. He would command more admiration in 
America than any British speaker, save, perhaps, Guthrie 
and Spurgeon. 

Their words were as fine as their ways. Mr. Bright'® 



184 A NIGHT IN PARLIAMENT. 

position in the debate did not lead him to so full a state- 
ment of principles as did Mr. Cobden's. The latter, in 
his argument against costly armaments in time of peace, 
cited the United States as an example of their needless- 
ness. 

His word in our favor was received with no favor 
by the House. They cheered his statement that un- 
armed we had bullied the world ; they oh-oh-ed his 
assertion that we had manifested a power such as no 
other nation could do. Their feelings were as unmistak- 
able as his. 

After much noise and confusion, one tedious member 
being scraped and coughed down, the House divided. 
All the members rushed pell-mell into the lobby behind 
the Speaker's chair, and tellers were stationed to tally 
them as they returned. This is a habit that would be 
more honored in the breach than in the observance. It 
is boyish and barbarous. "Why not call the roll, and re- 
spond quietly from their seats, like gentlemen ? Palmer- 
ston had an easy triumph ; and the noisy six hundred, 
at one o'clock in the morning, dissolved in an uproar. 

Two things struck me in that field-night, — the coarse- 
ness of the British gentry, and the utter nothingness of 
British politics. The whole debate was always quite in 
the verge of blackguardism. Epithets were hurled at 
each other with unceasing profusion. With much pre- 
liminary palaver of titles, the end was always a sling 
and a stone. " The noble lord is a fool " was the burden 
of every orator. The English are still the most brutal 
of peoples in their sports. Nowhere in Christendom, 
does boxing, horse-racing and kindred brutalities so 
flourish. The Parliamentarians partake of the same 
spirit. It is a boxing with ungloved tongues, — a careful 
elegance of phrase covering thinly a blow from the 
shoulder. Thus Cobden struck at Horseman in his 
opening ; thus Horseman sought to pummel Cobden. 



A NIGHT IN PARLIAMENT. 185 

Thus the two great leaders cut and thrust in intense and 
unceasing personalities ; and Bernal Osborne carried it to 
its natural, but too unveiled expression, when " he trusted 
that the honorable member from Bradford was not so 
soft as to suppose," &c. 

The American Parliament is far less personal in its 
invectives, especially in the masters and leaders of its 
debates. 

Another peculiarity of their debates is their valueless- 
ness. They are paltry conflicts over paltry themes, like 
the fierce wars of our politicians thirty years ago over 
Bank and Tariff and kindred infinitesimals, while the 
great questions of humanity and nationality were whis- 
tled down the wind ; so these are busy discussing arma- 
ments and expeditions, tariffs and free trade, while human 
rights find no mouth-piece, and awaken no interest. 
How we longed to see a man on that ancient floor stand 
up for the rights of man. Why does not Bright sound 
his silver trumpet, and call the nation to confer the right 
of universal suffrage ? Why does he not demand brief 
and paid parliaments ? Why not labor thus for what he 
says is the grandest deed in the world, — a free people 
electing their sovereign ? " The Democrat " should be 
published in London. The democratic party should be 
organized, and its leaders make Parliament ring with 
their just demands. 

This must come. The very slumber of English poli- 
tics assures us of its coming. Nothing can give its 
ancient parties life. Nothing separates them. As Whig 
and Democrat have been almost synonymous terms with 
us, for twenty years, and as the subsidence of all differ- 
ences between them gave the new party of humanity an 
opportunity to emerge into power ; so is the decay of 
Whig and Tory in England the precursor of a most 
fierce and deadly struggle which is yet to rend that land, 
to be reunited under the government of the people, by 
the people, and for the people. 



186 A NIGHT IN PARLIAMENT, 



THE HOUSE OP LORDS. 

As a supplement to the brilliant night in the House 
of Commons came a short and dull hour in the House 
of Lords. A like hall, but of smaller dimensions, is set 
off with sta4;ues of the nobles who wrested the Magna 
Charta from King John, and with windows filled with 
the glaring portraits of the kings of England. A few 
benches line the walls, a big woolsack on a table stands 
in the space between. A raised dais is at the farther 
end, covered with red, with three red chairs, and a 
red canopy and hangings. Those chairs were for the 
Queen, the Prince Consort, and the Prince of Wales. 
On the steps of the throne sat two men carelessly chat- 
ting ; one was picking his teeth. He was dressed ia 
light checked pants, and though old and ugly looking, 
was evidently irreverent and jolly. " That," said one 
sitting near me, " is Lord Brougham." Such lack of 
good manners was never seen in our Senate House. 
What would we think if we saw Charles Sumner sitting 
on the steps of the Vice-President's rostrum, picking his 
teeth and chatting with Chase or Seward similarly 
seated? A bewigged and begowned old man crosses his 
legs on the velvet cushions. There are a few words 
from the sandy-haired Argyle upon education ; a few 
from the Archbishop of York, now of Canterbury, and 
the Bishop of Lincoln, all confessing the narrowness of 
their views, the inefficiency of their plans, and the 
need of their efforts in this cause, as thoroughly and as 
wisely neglected by the aristocracy of Britain as it was 
by that of the South ; and the red-gowned tailor rises 
from his seat and the House of Lords is adjourned. The 
force of weakness could no farther go. How different, 
thought I, is this do-little body from those stern warriors 
that made the autocratic John surrender his dearest 
privileges ! The green meadow plain of Runnymede 



A NIGHT IN PARLIAMENT. 187 

was a field of glory and of might compared with its 
ornate representative of to-day. Away with such rub- 
bish ! Cast the gilded baubles of rank and title to the 
worms that have long since eaten out their life, and let 
men again govern England. A new Magna Charta 
should be wrested from the possessors of the old. The 
people should have their Runnymede, and the aristoc- 
racy, from knight to queen, should bow to their superior 
vigor and recognize them as sovereign. This House as 
surely hastens to its downfall as did the like effeminate 
Venetian council a century ago. They are powerless to 
guide the people, powerless to lead European sentiment. 
Giving neither arms nor voice to struggling Italy, Poland, 
or Denmark ; giving voice, and, as far as they have dared, 
arms to the struggling slave power; they will yet be 
swept out of sight, and senators, elected by the people, 
shall make this house an oracle of many, an oracle of 
God. 



XI. 




A BASKET OF LONDON FRAGMENTS. 

|ET US pick up a few of the broken bits that 
remain after our feast of weeks. " The king's 
chaff is better than other men's corn," and 
London crumbs are richer than country tables. The 
field of observation grows with observation, as every 
study expands to its student. Our baskets of fragments 
may thus outmeasure the full course already served up. 
Though we have rambled through familiar streets from 
the Tower to Whitehall, have haunted church and 
chapel, have hung on eloquent lips, or over more elo- 
quent dust, yet many gleanings have found no record. 
How could they ? If every character of the play is 
Hamlet, whatever is left out leaves him partly out. So 
whatever is in London is of London, and partakes some- 
what of its nature and renown. 

The bridges must be passed over in the story quite 
otherwise -than they were in fact. I would fain linger 
on their history, so romantic, and their romance, so his- 
toric. I would love to sit with you on one of these 
handsome stone seats that swell out from their sides, and 
watch the swift crowds pass before us and beneath us : 
those afoot or in a locked jam of omnibus, cart, and 
carriage; these on the crowded decks of the hideous 
little black steam-tugs that sweat and puff their toilful 
way up and down the most dirty and odorous river. 
One incident, illustrative at once of London poverty and 



A BASKET OF LONDON FRAGMENTS. 189 

London sport, can alone be chronicled. Forty feet under 
Hungerford Bridge, when the tide was out, scoreo of men 
and boys waded in the filthy mire knee-deep, and oft- 
times almost neck-deep, searching for pennies thrown to 
them from the bridge. Passers by were casting down 
the coins which sank into the oozy mud, and were enjoy- 
ing the sight of the fierce contestants who plunged pell- 
mell after them. Many pennies were lost, but enough 
were found to make the sport sportful in a very melan- 
cholic way. 

THE TEMPLE. 

A few rods from this disgusting pastime, you strike 
Fleet Street, close to Temple Bar. Being so near the 
Temple let us enter its gates. You can wander at wiU 
through its quiet courts and its more quiet chapel. 
The old gray buildings seem crowded with ghosts of the 
mighty departed, silently winding through corridor and 
path, as these present embodied ghosts now stealthily 
glide by. Yet how few memorable names live here. Its 
two greatest are those who never were of the fraternity. 
A slate stone, flat upon the earth, almost under the chapel, 
has inscribed upon it the simple words, " Oliver Gold- 
smith." Not his vanity, but his taste, would approve 
such simplicity. That grave is the most important relic 
within the gates. Another name joins itself to it, as 
I stand musing above it. I see that lad so gay, so 
grave, playing upon the stone. Did he not imbibe his 
weaknesses and virtues from the genial dust? His 
celibacy, his conviviality, his limpidity of style, his 
humor and gentleness of satire, can they not all be 
traced to that childish communion ? The seed buried 
here, in Lamb truly, brought forth fruit after its kind. 
The more proper men of the Temple — barristers, judges, 
wits, orators, and scholars — were forgotten by the side 
of these two intruders. 



190 A BASKET OF LONDON FRAGMENTS. 



THE SOCIETY OP THE COGERS. 

It is bnt a step in fact and feeding from this retreat to 
an institution as aged and pote t to-day as any of the 
city, — the debating clubs. Close to Temple Bar, on 
Fleet Street, one can daily see ti a little board, headed 
" Temple Discussion Hall," th- subject for the nightly 
debate. I visited one of the oldest, in Shoe Lane, out 
of the opposite side of Fleet Street. It was called the 
Society of the Cogers, and had some early date of the 
last century hanging over its bar as a witness of its age. 
Tables were set thick through the room, and lined thicker 
with hard-visaged, but honest-visaged, men, each enjoying 
his foaming pot or smoking pipe. The purchase of one 
of these is the price of admission, expected but not re- 
quired. Their value will be received as a fee from any 
curiosity hunter of a teetotaller. Here questions are 
nightly debated in parliamentary fashion, with considera- 
ble skill and ability. The Speaker sat in a raised recess, 
and kept the turbulent elements within bounds. The 
morality of the " Derby " was the theme for the night. 
Mr. Train denounced it in an effective parliamentary 
speech, and a McSomething defended it. The house 
was divided, and the Derby ites, by a small majority, won 
the day. The debates usually begin at nine, and close 
at midnight. In such a club as this — perhaps in this 
itself — Burke and Fox and Sheridan, and other Brit- 
ish orators, trained themselves for the parliamentary 
arena. It is a popular safety-valve ; the privilege of 
thus playing the politician making the frequenters con- 
tent with their actual disfrancliisement. The business is 
too real with us to allow such an institution to live. 
Academical or village lyceums, where unbearded youth 
prelibate the draughts whereof all our people drink, are 
the only American representatives of these flourishing 
political clubs. 



A BASKET OF LONDON FRAGMENTS. 191 

Passing out of Shoe Lane, up Fleet Street not many 
steps, we begin to ascend Ludgate Hill. Half way up, 
turn to your left and j^ou stand before a mass of huge, 
black, rough stones, wi. i here and there a grating or a 
heavy gateway, increasing its sombreness. Those repul- 
sive walls are the outer t ^rm of 

c. 

NEWGATE. 

Armed with an order from the governor of the prison, 
I found easy entrance. Narrow passages, low rooms, 
and the old-fashioned contractedness of such abodes were 
here yet. But their cleanliness, whiteness, and sweetness 
are the improvements that strive to redeem the ancient 
infamy. I was led into new apartments where was still 
farther evidence of the potency of modern ideas in prison 
discipline. They were open, spacious, inviting. Indeed 
they are so inviting, in contrast with the dens without, 
that the officer complained of the effect on the miserable 
savages which were brought hither. " Before they have 
been here," he said, " they have a horror of coming. 
But afterwards they prefer it to their homes, and com- 
mit crime fo^- the sake of the imprisonment." Yet he 
argued for farther reforms ; and advocated private exe- 
cutions in the very corridors where thousands had taken 
their last walk. A huge hole in the outer wall, closed 
ordinarily, opens to receive the gallows. It is run out 
of this aperture into the sight of boisterous myriads of 
jubilant felons, — the thick scum of London. Here 
Miiller, the last of the calendar, followed his unnumbered 
predecessors. The wails seem full of dreary noises, 
wails, misereres, life-long pinings, blasphemies, deaths: 
how the smoke of this torment ceaselessly ascends ! 
What a fountain of sins and sorrows here sends forth its 
exceeding bitter waters which no act of grace can 
sweeten. " Be pitiful, O God ! " He is pitiful even in 



192 A BASKET OF LONDON FRAGMENTS. 

His justice. The prison is as expressive of His good- 
ness as the cathedral behind it. Both are essential to 
the safety and progress of man ; both typify the unseen 
and eternal. 

THE NATIONAL GALLERY. 

If we proceed up High Holborn, we arrive in a walk 
of a mile and more at Trafalgar Square, into which the 
parallel Fleet Street and the Strand also enter and end. 
It is the most monumental spot in London, with its 
Nelson column, statues, and adornings. Along its chief 
front extends the somewhat sta.te\yfagade of the National 
Gallery. It contained but few pictures that I thirsted 
to see, and those few it is more than folly to describe. 
Kuskin has made us all mad with Turnerism. Had he 
not written, the great painter might have had his own 
conceit gratified, and his grandest paintings been buried 
in his tomb, with no especial sense of public loss. The 
poetic critic is not the first Homer that has proved him- 
self greater than the Achilles he heralds. As we seek 
only for the deeds of this Achilles as sung by his Homer, 
we pass almost carelessly by the other treasures which 
many more highly, perhaps more justly, prize. See 
that picture by Da Vinci, of " Christ disputing with the 
Doctors." How thoughtful, gentle, and self-composed is 
his countenance. Correggio's " Virgin and Child " hangs 
near, full of the inexpressible sweetness of his pencil, — 
most human and most angelic of painters. Raphael's 
" St. Catherine " is next ; one hand is on her breast, the 
other holds her robes, red without, and yellow within, 
whose opened folds disclose her saintly dress of gray. 
Her hair is rolled back from her uplifted head, and her 
eyes are fastened on the heavens. The face is full of 
holy fervor, and reveals the power of his perfect art ; 
more perfect seemingly in its earthly finish than in its 
heavenly aspiration. For how, one is almost tempted to 



A BASKET OF LONDON FRAGMENTS, 193 

say, can such elaboration of dress and posture, and even 
hair, — the exquisiteness of an earthly maiden apparelled 
for earthly conquests, — consist with those upraised eyes 
and that heaven-sighing soul ? His pictures seem hardly 
heavenly, but only super-earthly. This and all bear the 
tokens of humanity about all their spirituality. 

But next to him is the desired spirituaUty. Fra 
Angelico is as forgetful, as Raphael is mindful, of earth. 
There is no dust on his shining robes. Around 
Christ the angels float, praising him with voice or instru- 
ment. Christ is too exalted for his strain ; he always 
feels, and is, unequal to that majesty ; but the angels, — 
there he is at home. Never did such unconscious loveli- 
ness glow on canvas. They are more splendidly arrayed 
than Raphael's, in purple, scarlet, blue, and gold ; but they 
know it not. One only impulse they feel, — an unspeak- 
able devotion to their Saviour and their God. 

But we must hasten past this crowd of notables, 
among which are Teniers with his " Money- Changers," 
as natural as life can be ; William of Cologne's " Suda- 
rum," or head of Christ miraculously stamped on the hand- 
kerchief that a pitying woman of Jerusalem offered him 
to wipe his face upon, in that dreadful march up Calvary, 
and which this artist of Cologne painted upon his knees, 
— a white handkerchief seemingly, with a dark face upon 
it, and a gold aureole above it. Murillo's "Madonna," 
most motherly, and Jesus, most babe-like, can only re- 
ceive a glance ; and then comes the antechamber of 
Turner, Claude. His forerunner's landscapes precede 
his own, as if to defy their uttermost power. They are 

^ large and graceful, elegant in dress, architecture, and ex- 
pression, elaborate, careful, finished. But what are they 
by the side of the master ? A whole room is devoted 
to Turner. Only a few can be noticed, and they how 

*'J)oorly. See this " Building of Carthage " ; the water 
clear, and yet not, but full of life j trees equally alive 
13 



194 A BASKET OF LONDON FRAGMENTS. 

overhanging it ; buildings busily rising, and the heights 
crowned with a temple, all glowdug in the morning sky 
of an eastern day. " Calais " is a picture of intensest life. 
The waves are as busy as the boats that dance upon 
them ; no less energetic are the clouds, their counterpart 
in animation and beauty. Rarely is a painting alive 
with such inordinate excitement : and yet it is only natu- 
ral. Not a step beyond the possibilities of the vigorous 
morning of a sea-shore to^vn has his pencil stepped. 

How different, yet how like, is " Hannibal crossing th§ 
Alps," through a blinding rush of snow and cloud, while 
awful chasms open at his feet. " Dido and ^neas on the 
morning of the Chase " is wonderful for color and gor- 
geousness of light. " Crossing the Brook " is as superb 
in English scenery : trees, water, and skies have her ful- 
ness of beauty. " The Decline of Carthage " is in vivid 
contrast to its opposite. The sun is setting in a mist 
of glory, covering everything with the veil of death and 
beauty. " Ulysses deriding Polyphemus " has perhaps 
the most remarkable sea and sky of any in the hall. 
The galleys blaze in the blazing sunset. The sea is 
burnished gold. The defiant masters stand like Uriel in 
the sun. "■ The Old Temeraire " drawn to her dock, is 
less astonishing in splendor, though it would blind the 
eyes in any other collection. " Italy " is exquisite in 
color and scenery ; hills crowned with castles, waters, 
bridges, and stretches of low woods, make up the scene. 
" The Parting of Hero and Leander " is another glowing 
sky, covering the miniature and insignificant personages 
in its robe of light. In fact his people are of no account 
beside their surroundings. Earth and sky are the supe- 
riors of man. No form bears inspection ; none possesses 
character, hardly one even humanity. A blotch of color 
stands for the queenly Dido ; another for the godlike 
-^neas. It is only as a painter of the inanimate that he 
is sublime. In this his two chief American scholars, 



A BASKET OF LONDON FRAGMENTS. 195 

Cole and Church, closely copy him. " The Ship on 
Fire " is perhaps the subliraest of all. Such dark- 
ness and such light have never elsewhere been pro- 
duced by man. The awful sea and flames and sky, 
encompass the fated victims with unpitying death. The 
soul shudders as it sees. How one could paint such a 
horror it is difficult to imagine. No wonder he hastens 
from it to these frequent glories of harmless Nature, of 
which " Phryne going to the bath as Venus " is not the 
least, though our last, in enchantment. That procession 
winding through the foreground ; the palaces almost born, 
like the goddess herself, from the waters which they kiss ; 
the hills and clouds in equal glory clad — tongue and pen 
alike fail in description. Italy, in landscape art, is im- 
measurably behind. 

Yet, when you have recovered from the reeling 
draught, when you have stood bewildered at the con- 
ception and the execution of these wonders of Nature, 
I think you will do as I did, — go and sit down before 
Murillo's " Mother," so like your own, and Fra Angelico's 
"Angels," like what you seek and hope to be, and even 
before Teniers's homely veracity and humanity, with a 
certain solidity of satisfaction that the bedazzling Turner 
never conveys. Man is more than Nature, despite the 
rage of modern artists ; and Italy, as the painter of man, 
is still at the head of art. 

We turn from this display of Nature in her full dress of 
art, royal and resplendent, to her more frequent, familiar, 
and friendly array. It is but a few steps from this hall, 
along Charing Cross, up Whitehall, to the Abbey and 
the opening of 

THE PARKS. 

Beginning with St. James's, somewhat small of area, 
they wind thenceforth westward through the city, a 
broad green river, contrasting charmingly with the less 



196 A BASKET OF LONDON FRAGMENTS. 

real river that flows, filthy and fetid, not far from them, 
and nearly parallel with them. They take different 
names, but are one stream. Thick-carpeted, deep-shaded, 
neat, natural, unassuming, they are without the primness 
of the Versailles, or the too great artisticality of the New 
York Central. They are merely pastures in the heart 
of a huge metropolis ; as truly and simply pastures as 
when they were grazed and tilled by the tenants of some 
lordly owner. Boston Common is far more cut up into 
paths and lined with formal rows of trees. Here for- 
mality of tree and path is carefully eschewed. No 
threatening warnings and policemen vex your wander- 
ings. You can go whithersoever you will ; read, write, 
talk, or sleep under any wide-spreading oak, as if in the 
remotest clearing. One can easily fancy himself in the 
haunts of purest Nature, while sauntering through these 
spacious woodlands. Royal and ducal palaces appear on 
either side, but do not interfere with their countryishness. 
The Zoological Gardens occupy a portion of their fields, 
as rustic in their relations to the rest as a farmer's barn- 
yard to his meadows, though filled with quite a different 
sort of cattle than is found in his Zoology. 

Druid Hill Park, in Baltimore, is the only one in 
America that is as wildly beautiful as those of London ; 
and that, I fear, will yet be reduced to mathematical 
curves and lines, to enamelled walks and artistic bowers, 
and surprises and labyrinths and a' that, with which 
the town is always marring the nature it professes to 
perfect. 

BRITISH MUSEUM. 

The museums, too, offer their inexhaustible attractions. 
So immense is their capacity for absorption, that, were 
we to yield to their demands, a year would not suffice 
for their study, nor many folios for their description. 
South Kensington, with its pictures and gleanings of 



A BASKET OF LONDON FRAGMENTS. 197 

ancient furniture, is a study of weeks. But the com- 
pletest encyclopgedia in the world is the British Museum. 
Its pillared front, broad and stately, is among the finest 
architectural effects in the city. Curiosities of every sort 
crowd its immense halls ; from Greek and Assyrian mar- 
bles, through multitudinous birds and beasts, to the cir- 
cular reading-room, with its out-branching alcoves, fit 
home for chief creature of the collection, — man. Not 
the least among its attractions are the Assyrian marbles. 
The Elgin, though fairer, are more fragmentary ; they 
awaken painful emotions, as if we should see the arm or 
neck of beauty lying dismembered in a dissecting-room. 
But Assyria is preserved in perfection ; and though her 
genius is less, it is yet much. One is startled to see the 
grandeur of repose in these gigantic deities. Enormous 
winged lions guard the entrance with the calmest, mild- 
est, strongest of manly faces. No Grecian deity has 
more of divinity in his more artistically chiselled coun- 
tenance. I can easily discern the outer polish and pro- 
priety of Assyrian religion and government in these 
symbols. I saw how Ezekiel and Daniel, familiar with 
these figures, readily beheld a harmonious and heav- 
enly vision in the strange combination of eagle, lion, and 
man. Daniel's lion with eagle's wings is here. Eze- 
kiel's living creature, with its faces of lion, ox, eagle, 
and man, was no unseemly object as seen in the light of 
these sculptures. Their idolatry outwardly was stately, 
however abominable within. A similar life-likeness ani- 
mates the bas-reliefs, which stretch around the walls for 
many hundreds of feet, and impart the most vivid con- 
ception of battles and banquetings, the chase and the 
siege. 

But we must not linger in these walls. Other mar- 
bles, beside which these are but worthless fragments, 
await our worship in their native home. 

Resolutely turning my back on this vast and rapidly- 



198 A BASKET OF LOXDOX FRAGMESTS, 

laereMsii^ ooUectkww I iKtuce th»nk^illy. ji5 1 lesrt^. tbe 
obscure chirographv, blurred iind inierlinod, corrected 
and reo>rTected, of MkomUhj wid Bcipe ai\d MiUoti« and 
i^iise to noiioe ^ deioi pi^ of Scott atni Goethe^ 
without Uot or clMi^e« or anj $uoh thhig. AVhich is 
the hi^cr authority ? The great arbitei^ of the dolvatc, 
Shakspeane aiid Honier, have left i» decisioa in their 
own handwriting. So the problem must remain un^>l\-ed» 
and es»ch penman may gang his ain gait^ in his hand no 
less than in hts 1^ and brain. 

THK KOHlXOv^R. 

Two things chieily drew me to the GiVAt Exhibition. 
That gigantic spectacle was in full blossom then, but I 
Wiis satisfied with t\\\> or three gl;UK*es at its bewiKlering 
pageantry. It was all reducible to thive stones, — the 
eonsuramation of art and nature, — Story's marbles and 
the Kohinoor. The last is merely a stone of blaiing 
whiteiK^^s. The perfection of coal is crystal. The es- 
sence and giocy of blackness is the extreme of whiteness. 
Coal is clearly a thing iK»t to Ix^ despised. In its black 
estate it has in itself nwre of the flame ainl heat of its 
original than all other stMies put together. It enlight- 
ens and w-arms the Avorld. And here we see it, not a 
grim worker, nor the tiery impulse of the engine, nor 
the flashing represeiitative of the sun. hut solid and 
ceaseless liglit. Stevenson >\-i\s right when he said to 
Peel, looking at a living train, " The sun is drawing that 
train. It is the true C!»r of Apollo. For cotU is but 
the condensation of light and heat. They pressed them- 
selves into ferns, and, liberated now from their prison- 
house of ages, they appear in their original forms.** 
This steadily-throbbing star, not an inch across, is the 
essence and eniKxiiment of a million, nn-s. It seems 
to have life in itself. Is it not thus with man ? Will 



A BASKET OF LONDON FRAGMENTS. 199 

not the black and torrid man, into whose nature the most 
powerful influences have been poured, yet sliine in the 
human family with a glory above all his fellows, as thia 
gem outshines the haughty gold and silver that glower 
enviously around ? Another thought flashed on me from 
its quivering radiance : What must be the glory of the 
celestial city, wliich is of pure gold like unto clear glass, 
and whose every gate is of one pearl ? Their tiny 
sparkles suggest what that " entire and perfect chryso- 
lite " will be, only so far and so feebly as the faith and 
joy of the Christian can the dazzling rapture of that estate 
when we shall behold the glory which Christ has with the 
Father, and shall partake of its fulness forever. 

CLEOPATRA AND THE SIBYL. 

There is a little room in the Roman Department 

through which a crowd is slowly and ceaselessly strug- 

ling. It is lined with statuary. But the people do not 

throng hither to see all its works, many of which are 

worthy of high praise. Two statues only attract them. 

These sit in the corners next the entrance ; Cleopatra 

to the left, the Sibyl to the right. Very calm, almost to 

indifference, they appear. Yet so strong is the power 

condensed into every feature, that once seen they are 

seen always. They have followed me through the miles 

of art that Europe has since displayed, through the 

grander creations of Nature ; and still their eyes, though 

veiled, are ever 

" Looking through and through me, 
Thoroughly to undo me." 

They are not mere pieces of carved and polished stone ; 
not even mere expressions of ordinary truth and beauty. 
Far deeper lie their meaning and their influence. They 
are historic and prophetic, looking before and after. 
Cleopatra proves the possibility of that of which the 



200 A BASKET OF LONDON FRAGMENTS. 

Sibyl asserts the necessity.* They are wrought out 
under impressions that have hardly as yet reached the 
public mind, but are only shadowily dreamed and feared. 
Shall I sketch the preachers before I do their sermons ? 

They are both in a similar position, and have a similar 
expression. They sit in a very easy posture, in ancient 
Egyptian chairs, the former in the Egyptian dress mi- 
nutely elaborated. A finger of Cleopatra's hand is pressed 
against its palm, as though the artist was afraid she 
would appear lax and feeble in her voluptuousness, and 
through this device she could show the firmness of her 
nature. It seemed to me a defect. She should not 
appear to intend to express anything. Unconscious ex- 
pression is the only powerful and true expression. She 
is full of this ; for her whole bearing, though soft and 
dreamy, is replete with vigor and force of character. 

But it is not her form or posture that chiefly attracts 
you. All her qualities embody and reveal themselves 
more clearly in the countenance. Thither all lines con- 
verge. The features are large, compared with the 
Grecian face of conventional art, but strikingly like 
those on Egyptian monuments. The lips and the eyes 
are full, the cheek-bones high, forehead low ; in fine, 
the cast of the countenance is decidedly African. Even 
the marbles seem to be discolored. According to or- 
dinary standards, there is no beauty in them that we 
should desire them. Some ladies stood beside me gazing 
at them. " Beautiful, ar' n't they ? " said one, as she had 
been taught by the " Times." " Yes, very," replied the 
other ; and then, as if revolting against its authority, she 
adds, " But the faces are not handsome." The other 
assents. That is the first impression. And that impres- 
sion is increased by their position among a gallery full of 
Grecian faces. " Jephthah's Daughter," " Esther," Bry- 
ant's "Indian Girl," look not like Jewesses or Indians, 
but as if made to order by a Greek potter. These two 



A BASKET OF LONDON FRAGMENTS. 201 

beauties are evidently African, not Athenian. It would 
seem as if, having been created in seclusion, they are pro- 
videntially placed among these popular models, and com- 
pel our admiration against our will, as the race they 
represent is brought out from the seclusion of ages, and 
placed among their haughty brethren, compelling their 
notice, and ultimately their admiration and regard. 

For there are sermons in these stones. Cleopatra 
looks the easy mistress of the world. She does not 
smile upon her Grecian rivals, but all can see that she 
is sensible of her superiority, and that they are sensible 
of it also. Cool, and yet fiery ; in intense repose, and 
yet in intense action ; conscious, and still unconscious : 
all these contraries, balancing contraries, are embodied 
in that statue. It seems to say, " I belong to a despised 
race, but you shall feel that I am your superior. What 
if my forehead is low, and cheek-bones high, and lips 
thick, and nostrils not undistended ? What if all the 
characteristics of the negro are stamped upon my coun- 
tenance ? You shall acknowledge that they are no 
drawback to my power; that they may even be the 
weapons of my conquest. You shall be my slaves, as 
my people are yours. Not every one of you can ap- 
proach me. Your selected representatives and rulers, 
they shall be my worshippers. On them will I cast 
my chains. Their passion, their infatuation, shall teach 
all your race the folly and criminality of your pretended 
natural abhorrence of my blood. It is negro blood ; and 
your Antony, the type of your beauty and culture ; your 
Csesar, the representative of your highest qualities of 
mind and will, — these shall seek alliance, at any sacri- 
fice, with the African. They shall teach Caucasians 
of every age and clime that my blood is as good as 
theirs, — is one with theirs ; that it is as great an honor 
and privilege for you to marry me, as for me to marry 
you. The time has been when, in my person and in 



202 A BASKET OF LONDON FRAGMENTS. 

that of these proudest names in your race, this truth 
was recognized. It will be again. It will be uni- 
versally." 

Here the Sibyl opes her marble lips. Sibylla Lybica, 
the artist calls her. I am sorry he shrank from giving 
her a name by which she and her meaning would be 
instantly recognized. Multitudes gather from its name 
that it was intended to represent some Oriental priestess, 
and hence see in it only a work of art. It ought to be 
plainly printed in the catalogue — Sibylla Africa. But 
it is so printed in the marble ; and perhaps he acted 
wisely in choosing words that in themselves were not 
repulsive, but were even attract iv^e ; and so, by a little 
guileless guile, drew attention and admiration to what 
would have been otherwise rejected without considera- 
tion. Hence the name of the most famous of ancient 
beauties is given to a plantation beauty of to-day. And 
the prophetess has a classic though African title, by 
which her origin and calling are alike suggested. 

There sits the negro Sibyl. How perfect the repose ! 
Cleopatra's finger does not mar her hand. She is with- 
out voluptuousness, without rigidity ; with more force 
than a Madonna, and with no less tenderness ; with no 
Cassandra ravings, yet apparently on a Cassandra mis- 
sion. Her sad, sweet, calm face looks towards you 
and yet past you, as though you were of slight impor- 
tance compared with that on which her eyes are fixed. 
They look into the future, up to God. There is no 
earthly love here. She embodies the religious, as the 
other does the earthly, problems that invest this race ; 
the divine, as that the human. She is a vestal, pure 
and of solemn aspect, sadly uttering her burden of 
vision. She does not appear to care about our answers. 
It is hers to speak. It is God's to take note of our re- 
plies. Can you hear her words ? They are addressed 
directly to America ; to its Christians, to its patriots ; 
to all. Thus they seem to speak : — 



A BASKET OF LONDON FRAGMENTS. 203 

" Receive me as your own self or perish. I am bone 
of your bone and flesh of your flesh. The same God 
apd Father makes us of the same parents, redeems 
us by the same Saviour, renews us by the same Spirit, 
appoints us the same destiny. Why put you a difference 
between us ? Why do you carefully cultivate an ab- 
horrence of us ? My children play with yours in their 
youth. Why are they cast out from their society as an 
accursed thing as soon as they come to maturer years ? 
Why is it that no one, with my blood in his veins, can 
be a master-workman, can hardly be a subordinate work- 
man in any mechanical callings, — a clerk or partner in 
your stores, — a teacher in your schools ? Why is it, 
when one of them is called to the ministry, ' not of man, 
neither by man, but by Jesus Christ and God the Father/ 
— why is it that he is forbidden to exercise his sacred 
office except over people of his own complexion ? Did 
God say to him, * Go work among the black grapes in 
my vineyard : the white clusters only white servants can 
prune and perfect ' ? Why is it that oneness of race is 
practically abjured by the disciples of Christ, and schol- 
ars pervert their learning to build up a scientific founda- 
tion for your prejudices, as they have in other times for 
equally powerful and popular abominations ? " 

With many like words she quietly penetrates our 
souls. She utters no complaint. She asks the questions 
which are appointed unto her by God. She declares 
the burden of judgment : — " If you will not abandon your 
prejudices, you will be devoured of them. There is no 
other alternative. Do or die. You refused to do. You 
were brought to the gates of death. Still you partially 
revolt from your duty. Many of your journals, truest 
to human liberty, are careful to say that they do not like 
the colored race, and wish it were out of the way. 
They are defending great principles that happen to be 
embodied in a very offensive people. They seek to 



204 A BASKET OF LONDON FRAGMENTS. 

crowd us out of the land by a professedly voluntary, 
but really compulsory, emigration. Ah ! " says the 
Sibyl, " God has joined the'se vital principles to His 
despised people, in order that they may be saved only 
through our admission into all the conditions of national 
brotherhood. You cannot preserve them unless you 
take us also. You have welcomed the down-trodden 
masses of Europe, with less culture, with less religion, 
with far worse habits, than my people. You set no 
barriers to their elevation. Their blood flows freely 
and honorably with your own. But we, — natives to the 
soil for two hundred years and over, industrious, honest, 
virtuous, religious, intelligent, in comparison with our 
opportunities, more than they, — we are still an abhorred 
thing. You must treat us as you do these, or you shall 
become like unto us. If you will not allow us to ascend, 
you must descend. Prejudices as baseless and as ruin- 
ous have existed elsewhere than in America. The holy 
chapel of Paris, a marvel of wealth and beauty, was 
built by the most pious of the Bourbons out of the 
money of the Jews whom he robbed and expelled. Jews 
rule France to-day ; but where are the Bourbons ? 
Spain expelled the Moors. Where is Spain ? Ander- 
nach, a once imperial town among the Rhine mountains, 
has forbidden for centuries a Jew to enter her walls. 
He is still forbidden. But no one else enters them. 
America may imitate pompous little Andernach. It 
will only be sure of a like fate. A law of repulsion, 
to be binding and natural, must be mutual. The Jew 
and Christian in the Middle Ages repelled each other. 
The Christian is becoming cured of his prejudices : the 
Jew will soon be of his. But this feeling, which you 
try to erect into a divine law, has no such necessary 
foundation. The African is not inwardly repelled from 
the rest of the human race. He has no such abhorrence. 
The other races, therefore, cannot say that their repug- 



A BASKET OF LONDON FRAGMENTS. 205 



nance is natural. You have sought to make your preju- 
dices a law of God. The slaveholders have been in 
advance of you in this radical question. Of your race, 
long your rulers, they do not loathe us. They held us 
in chains, not because of prejudice, but for power and 
pelf. Unless you have their feelings you cannot utterly 
break their yoke. They will rule you in their ruin, 
if you seek to cast us from you. We are chained to- 
gether. You must raise us up out of this Alpine chasm, 
or we shall inevitably drag you down." 

So speak these marbles. I have reported them hon- 
estly, though far below their full utterance. He who 
carved them evidently 

" "Wrought in a sad sincerity. 
He builded greater than he knew, 
The conscious stone to beauty grew." 

It grew to truth, to persuasion, to prophecy. I think 
their artist the bravest American except John Brown. 
He has dared to do what the most courageous of Abo- 
litionists have never yet dared to say. He has made a 
negress the model of beauty, — an African prophetess 
the seer of America. Shall we imitate his courage ? 
We have shown an abundance of an inferior sort. The 
valor of the battle-field is less than that of principle. 
We have thrust out our Hebrew servants. We refuse 
to cover them with our national robes and jewels, — 
equality, fraternity. They will be stripped from us 
if we do not share them with these our neighbors and 
kindred. God has not ordered them out of the land. 
It is their Canaan. He demands, in behalf of five mil- 
lions of His children, that we pay no more regard to 
complexion than to language. Let the accident of 
color, as of birth, be forgotten. Let every road be as 
freely open to them as to every other man. This is all 
He asks. We must grant it, or yet lose our own liberties. 
While uttering her burden, the Sibyl appeared to be 



206 A BASKET OF LONDON FRAGMENTS. 

not merely a prophetess, but the Sphinx, the organ of 
judgment as well as of vision. She proposed her riddle. 
We must solve it, or be devoured. Have we an OEdipus 
who, by his courageous wisdom, will insure our salvation ? 

These marbles are by far the finest works of art in 
the Exhibition. But their art is their least excellence. 
This grace is poured upon them, as like fascination 
is upon great preachers of righteousness, that we may 
listen to the all-important truths they are appointed 
to convey. Will we listen ? will we obey ? will we 
hear the cries of the peoples of Europe, gasping in the 
clutches of aristocratic pride and power, " Save your- 
selves that you may save us. Treat all nations and 
peoples alike. Be consistent democrats, and democracy 
shall soon supplant royalty in all these commonwealths." 
The unborn generations of America entreat us that we 
will not bequeath to them an inheritance ruined by a 
godless pride. The very rulers of Europe, hopeful of 
our overthrow, laughed us to scorn because our destruc- 
tion was coming from a refusal to be faithful to our own 
principles. 

We have treated this negro Sibyl as Tarquin did the 
Roman. He repented in time to save a little that she 
offered him, though at immeasurably greater cost than 
was first demanded. Our refusal has already cost us 
priceless blood and incalculable treasure. We yielded 
slightly under the terrible chastisements of the Almighty. 
We consented to lock shields with him for our salvation. 
Still our hearts are hard. We refuse to seal the vows of 
liberty which we made. The waste of life and treasure 
may avail us naught, unless we follow the example of 
the proud Roman, and make the Sibyl the priestess of our 
faith and practice. 

May this remarkable courage of Mr. Story awaken 
corresponding courage in others. Ministers, philanthro- 
pists, Christians, patriots, let not a work of art rebuke 



A BASKET OF LONDON FRAGMENTS. 207 

your silence and convince you of sin. Take the position 
he has, — the only true position. God hath made of 
ONE blood all nations of men. Carry it out consistently, 
courageously, and America shall yet be, more than ever 
before, the hope and glory of the whole world ; and our 
motto, JS Plurihus Uiiurriy embrace in its grand signifi- 
cance, not only states, but the peoples, tongues, and races 
of all mankind. 

But our fragments are getting overlaid with art-criti- 
cisms and inflammatory orations. Shut down the basket- 
cover and conclude the feast. Dear old London, with its 
crooked streets and lanes, its delightful surprises of 
alleys and courts, most grandfatherish of nooks and cor- 
ners ; with its history and wealth and noise and floods of 
people, and yet greater floods of never-ceasing showers ; 
with its arrogance and coolness, its horrid coffee and 
exquisite chops, crammed, confused, bewildering, allur- 
ing, unfathomable, familiar, cordial, fatherly old London, 
a Dieu! To God I commit thy mighty millions. May 
they yet be free, moral, comfortable, and Christian. 
How fearful the elements of great cities ! How unlike 
those of the city above ! Vice and vanity are the masters 
below, wealth and wickedness, the miser and the miser- 
able. But 'tis not so above. Why does congregated 
humanity ever breed moral pestilence ? Why are great 
cities always great sores ? Why do the pure country 
youth of England or New England, of America or 
Europe, plunge from heaven to hell in leaving the virtu- 
ous allurements of rural society for the deadly fascina- 
tions of the metropolis ? The depravity of man needs 
no other argument to prove its potency and universality. 
As air soon becomes fetid if breathed by a crowd ; as 
uncleanness rapidly infects street and house if thronged 
by multitudes, so does the moral air become rife with 
ruin if inhaled by compact populations. Only the most 
vigorous sanitary efforts can moderately restrain the 



208 A BASKET OF LONDON FRAGMENTS. 

superabounding vice. These efforts the Christians of 
London faithfully put forth. Schools, churches, every 
ounce of saintly civet they are casting into the pesti- 
lential mass, and with partial success. Yet I expect the 
centre of Africa will be as pure and pious as the most se- 
, eluded village of America ere any great city of Christen- 
dom is really Christian. 

But a pile of fragmentary thoughts is gathering on 
the cover of my enclosed basket. It is enough. 




XII. 



TENNYSON'S HOME AND ROBERT BROWNING. 




EXT to seeing a famous man is seeing the house 
he lives in. In fact that is nearly all that we 
see when we stand in his bodily presence ; for 
rarely does such an one bring forth his greatness for the 
admiration of the curiosity hunter. That is hidden deep 
in the close-locked vaults of his spirit, and only bosom 
friends can gaze upon it. This thought I took to comfort 
me after the loss of that which I had never found, though 
it had been greedily and somewhat hopefully sought. 

Coming into Southampton from Havre, I had enjoyed 
the sight of the green- wooded Isle of Wight, most novel, 
most welcome, in contrast with the barren bloom of east- 
ern shores or the drizzly winter nakedness of French and 
German landscapes. England, like rich men, keeps up 
the appearance of her demesne all the year round. She 
never loses her greenness, carefulness, luxuriance, or re- 
pose. Being so near the popular poet of the age, I 
resolved to spend a day in getting as good a glimpse as 
possible of his person and park. The last I roamed 
through at will. The first I found as shadowy as ^fieas 
did his elusive sire. 

A little tug on a stormy day wriggles its way down 

the Solent, a sound between the great isle and the little 

one, and after tedious tossing, lands its sickened freight 

at the petty port of Yarmouth. A walk of three miles 

14 



21(> TENNYSON'S HOME 

alongside of the high walls that everywhere encompass 
an Englishman's home, — if he have any home to enoora- 
pass, as but few truly have, — on the smooth, hard roads, 
luxurious even in their wet estate ; up gently sloping 
hills, through sweet water valleys, quiet with park-like 
beauty, and the rear of the Laureate's home is reached. 
Misdirection brought me to the backdoor of the place. 
Here a deep cut in the ascending downs is entered, pri- 
vate and very muddy, even if Tennysonian, — a charge 
that cannot lie against his verse, — between high banks 
of mud, capped with hedges and walls. Wading up- 
ward for a third of a mile, past his barns and out-build- 
ings, the huts of his servants and sheltered cottage of 
his overseer, a high rustic gate offers a way of escape. 
Opening it, I find myself close to the house. It is of 
gray brick, two stories high, with a French roof, — a 
verandah on the side entrance, a bay-window in front. 
It stands in a thicket of trees, at the top of a gently 
sloping, tree- besprinkled lawn. Being so near, I thought 
I would try to get nearer. I had loaded my gun, at the 
village of Yarmouth, for the purpose of bringing down 
this shyest of game. It missed, as was not unlikely, 
with so poor a inarksman. A card accompanied a note, 
stating in a few words my nationality, admiration, and 
desire for a brief interview. I approach the door, in- 
quire if Mr. Tennyson is at home, and am answered in 
the affirmative. I requested the lad to hand him the 
note, and soon receive the compliments of Mrs. Tenny- 
son, with the less agreeable conclusion that Mr. Tennyson 
is not in. Who was right, the boy or the mistress, I 
had no means of learning ; enough for me was the last 
word. Perhaps both ; for he may have been " in " 
bodily, and yet on some Pegasean flight ; so that though 
in the body he was out of the body, — "a disembodied 
thought." Perhaps that " American " was the reason 
of my failure, — his aristocratic sympathies making him 



AND ROBERT BROWNING. 211 

repellant of too great familiarity with the representa- 
tives of ideas that he prefers to sing rather than to 
practise ; for quite a worshipper of titles is the author 
of " Locksley Hall," " Lady Clara Vere de Vere," and 
'* Maud." Perhaps he was not really in ; and most likely, 
with commendable good sense, though in, he disliked 
being pen-and-inked by this unknown wandering game- 
ster from foreign shores, and did precisely what we 
should all be likely to do under like circumstances. 
Everybody hates to be made a spectacle, especially to 
mere curiosity seekers ; and the only right way, also a 
feasible way, is to get introductions from friends, that 
will ensure you not merely a sight of the outer, but of 
the inner man ; not only a sight, but a feeling ; an ac- 
quaintance, perhaps an intimacy. This can be readily 
secured, if you have an acquaintance with any of their 
acquaintance ; if not, you can easily follow up the trail 
till you strike it. A true explorer of earth or man can 
always, if patient and persistent, win his prize. Lack 
of time and opportunity prevented any farther strategy 
to reduce this fortress of Mansoul; so I must content 
myself with the outer aspects, — the house, the place, 
the landscape, — which last are partakers and represent- 
atives of his innermost spirit. For more than any 
other British poet, save Wordsworth, " in the eye of 
Nature has he lived," and felt her soul passing into his 
"with purer restoration." A thick-set grove is on the 
side and rear of the house. It breaks up into thinner 
clumps of verdure before the wing of the house, and opens 
out on the front into the smooth descending landscape 
of a British lawn. The house is of modest proportions ; 
the parlors covering the open and southern side. This 
my eye, wandering from the lawn housewards, fancied it 
discovered. The outlook from the windows is neither 
sublime nor beautiful. The lawn slides off into the 
highway — an eighth of a mile from the house. Beyond 



212 TENNYSON'S HOME 

it appears the common breadth of a common landscape. 
Neither hill nor dale, sea nor shore, are in sight ; the 
" imagination all compact " has to create its conceptions 
out of materials gathered elsewhere than under the im- 
mediate eye. Wordsworth sitting on the stumps in his 
garden, and looking upon Nature in her infinite variety of 
solemnity and beauty, reflects in his verse, as on a photo- 
graph plate, the impressions she makes upon the soul ; 
though not, as some might think, in the colorless style of 
our photographs. He caught the trick that the trade yet 
seek, and painted Nature as she is. Tennyson, on the 
contrary, tramps over long spaces to find spots fitted for 
his easel, takes his sketch with his eye, retires to his 
studio, and works hard and long over the painting into 
which this sun-picture shall grow ; a painting in which 
there is more of genius and of art than of Nature ; less 
of the actual than the ideal. A talkative trader in pict- 
ures and other local attractions, whose little shop is near 
his place, said he was a kind neighbor, at times very 
conversational, at times very reserved ; but with no 
striking whims and oddities, such as are supposed to be 
the common heritage of poets and men of genius. He 
has a shuddering abhorrence of lionizing, which a little 
tavern, directly opposite his house, often filled with gaping 
Cockneys, does not tend to diminish. 

A mile or so from his home is the little village of 
Freshwater. A dozen cottages line each side of a road 
that terminates in the uniform, ancient, square-towered 
church. It has hardly been touched these five hundred 
years. Here he worships in less depth, if in greater 
breadth of soul, than his predecessor at Grasmere. A 
handful of graves, sunken with age, cling to its rude 
walls. The land behind and beyond it drops rapidly off 
into a narrow estuary of the sea. Beyond this, it rises 
into the rolling, thin-soiled downs, that constitute a pe- 
culiar feature of the island, and of " Enoch Arden." 



AND ROBERT BROWNINO. 213 

Behind his house they rise in a high, sleep, rolling ridge, 
which commands probably the Southern and Western 
shores of the island. But rain and time — too much of 
the first, and too little of the last — prevented my enjoy- 
ment of that scene, whose bright or dreary features 
appear in so many of his poems, especially in " In Me- 
moriam." I rescretted that I could not climb and see 



■"&' 



" The stately ships go on 
To their haven under the hill." 

But without the sight and sound of the steady beating 
of the sea upon the* crags, the pathos of the moaning 
conclusion echoed in the soul; a pathos which no other 
poet equals, save Wordsworth, and he in but one line, — 
the saddest in poetry, — 

" But she is in her grave, and oh ! 
The diflference to me." 

The winter day closes early in these high latitudes. 
Low, thick clouds the earlier shut it in. The windows 
of heaven are opened, and all their floods poured out. 
The famed isle does not look especially attractive in this 
shower-bath ; the most beautiful damsel could hardly 
maintain her beauty under such an ablution. The 
scenery appeared less romantic, and even less finished, 
than much of that in the Lake District. The boat is 
reached, and Freshwater and Tennyson, the seen and the 
unseen, are bidden a most tearful farewell. May future 
visitors from afar be more successful in obtaining a 
glimpse, if no more, of one who is so kindly and cordial 
in the more living revelations of his muse. 



ROBERT BROWNING. 

I had better luck with his compeer and friend than 
with himself. It was a mild, almost sunny January 
afternoon, that found me riding up Oxford Street, past 



214 TENNYSON'S HOME 

Hyde Park, on my way to Warwick Crescent, Harrow 
Road. After an hour's drive through a continuous wall 
of gray brick, I am let down in a scarcely sparser neigh- 
borhood, where genteel residences triumph over shops 
and factories. It is not rural, not even suburban, though 
many miles from Guildhall. It has, however, a fresh 
look, as if lately subdued, — the charming country unwill- 
ingly transformed into the unlovely town. It had not 
lost all its former grace. The houses were set off with 
tiny parks and ponds, that feelingly remind us what they 
were. The rustic Thisbe whispers of her former beauty 
to her urban Pyramus through these walls. 

A curve of comely gray brick houses encompasses a 
little pond. Quiet as Grasmere is the pool and its en- 
closing street and walks. The grocer, and a few like need- 
ful intruders, rattle their morning carts around it. The 
postman and the residents rarely pace the unresponsive 
flags. The houses, though uniform and compact toge- 
ther, have a villa-like air, as though it were pleasant for 
them also to remember the country. In this they con- 
trast agreeably with like blocks in our cities. Many 's 
the spot in London where you get retirement, trees, 
water, and a cozy style of country-dwellings at reasonable 
rates, yet near enough to the howling centres of traffic. 
The usage might be profitably transferred across the 
Atlantic. 

In one of these city villas, in quiet so profound, dwells 
the poet, Kobert Browning. A card and note of intro- 
duction from a mutual friend gave me instant admission. 
I was ushered into one of those snug parlors that compel 
good-nature and sociality. The poet enters, and as 
warm and hearty a greeting as the oldest of friends could 
wish, disabuses me instantly of the long cherished notion, 
that one so recondite in his writings must be monkish in 
his habits. Perhaps he is monkish, for the memory of 
certain fascinating hours spent at the hospices of the 



AND ROBERT BROWNING. 215 

Simplon and St. Bernard convinces me that monks are 
among the jolliest of men. 

His dress was half deshabille, — a light gray business 
suit and open neck, un throttled by the garotting tie. He 
excused himself for his free and easy dress, and perhaps 
will not excuse me for telling of it. But everybody 
likes to see his favorites in their undress ; and so you 
will like this photograph better than if it was arrayed 
in faultless costume. 

A sketch of Tennyson reading " Maud," is on the man- 
tel. It represents him lounging in an easy-chair, with 
one leg drawn up on the cushion, and held in its place 
by a nursing hand, while he holds the little volume in the 
other (hand, not leg) ; and the tall, bearded, repellant, 
yet all-fascinating poet, is slowly chanting, in an unheard 
but not unfelt monotone, his song of songs. Do you not 
hear it ? 

" I hate the dreadful hollow behind the little wood." 

The sketch was taken by an artist when Tennyson 
\^as reading the poem at the Brownings. As Webster in 
his old hat, under the Marshfield elms, and Walter Scott 
among his dogs, reveal the man, and hence please their 
friends far more than statelier affairs, such as Webster 
in the Senate, and Scott in his Edinburgh Monument, so 
will these homely sketches of Tennyson and Browning. 

He is of the medium size, light hair and eyes, very 
pleasant features and expression, not too handsome for a 
man, and not heavy and over-fleshed, like most English- 
men. His residence abroad, or his active nature, per- 
haps both, prevent that redundancy of flesh with which 
this amphibious air clothes most of his race. Air and 
water, in England, are largely unified : so also in Eng- 
lishmen ; not so in Browning. 

Conversation began on the only subject then talked of 
in Europe, — the American war. His sympathies were 



216 TENNYSON'S HOME 

with lis most heartily, and he spoke with an evident sense 
of gratitude of the field which America opens to the 
writers of Britain, and of our earlier appreciation of new 
talent and readier recognition of it than was common, 
perhaps possible, in their more solidified society. 

While chatting, his boy entered the room, rosy-cheeked, 
sliiii, well-made, and comely. He was about fourteen 
years old, and was pursuing his studies for Oxford. A 
child of such remarkable parents is somewhat in the con- 
dition of precocious fame, which Longfellow tells us is 
like putting the corner-stone of your monument upon your 
head, and then building up to it from the earth. Should 
he prove to have the resultant of parental genius, he 
will be like the administration that was made up " of all 
the talents." 

The house seemed vacant. Her picture is on the 
wall. Yet one looks for the living presence of this 
greatest among women, but looks in vain. Other pictures 
and minor works of art make the room homelike, though 
not truly homelike. What a sad, perhaps unconscious 
presentiment of the hour ran through the lines in that 
tenderest and deepest of conjugal madrigals, — " One 
Word More." 

, " I shall never, in the years remaining, 

Paint your pictures, no, nor carve your statues, 

Make you music that should all express me. 

So, it seems, I stand in my attainment. 

This of verse alone our life allows me; 

Verse, and nothing else, have I to give thee. 

Other heights in other lives, God willing; 

All the gifts from all the heights, your own, love." 

Mr. Browning is more known through his wife than 
through himself This should not and will not be. His 
genius is equal, in some respects, superior. With Ten- 
nyson they occupy the highest English poetic seats of 
this generation. They rule the world as from one throne. 
Of these, Browning is the most playful, dramatic, and 
thoughtful. Tennyson never lowered himself to Words- 



AND ROBERT BROWNING. 217 

worthian ballads or Southeyan chat with children. Mrs. 
Browning is oft like " ^schylus the thunderous," and is 
always in full dress, even when looking from Casa Guidi 
windows and cheering on the Italians to victory. Brown- 
ing appears before the public as before his friends, in the 
abandon of ease and playfulness. " Pied Piper of Hame- 
lin," « Up at a Villa, down in the City," " How they 
brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix," are ex- 
amples of this delightful freedom ; while " Evelyn Hope," 
"Saul," "By the Fireside," "Death in the Desert," 
" Rabbi Ben Ezra," and " Prospice," strike as profound 
depths as any poet reaches, and many a drama unknown 
to the theatre is full of swiftest life. 

But we are getting away from the man to his works. 
Yet they are the man. Whoever would see him must 
study them. " Fit audience, though few," they boast. 
It will increase with years. Of God and himself he 
really, perhaps knowingly, wrote in that half-lamenting, 
half-exulting poem, " Popularity." 

" His clenched hand shall unclose at last, 
I know, and let out all the beauty ; 
My poet holds the future fast, — 
Accepts the coming ages' duty, — 
Their present for this past." 

The brief hours galloped away. We broke the, to 
us, charmed spell, and he took his place in our memorial 
Pantheon. No finer soul adorns that gallery. If we have 
sketched him poorly, it is not for want of admiration ; 
if, as he may think, too plainly, it is not because of dis- 
respect. Poets, the most transparent of men, whose 
profession it is to carry their hearts upon their sleeves 
for daws to peck at ; who are constantly surpassing 
Prometheus, in that they voluntarily offer their ever- 
growing souls to that ever-devouring vulture, the cor- 
dially hated, yet more cordiall}' loved, public, offset this 
superaboundiug frankness with corresponding sensitive- 
ness at any description of their fleshly tabernacles. But 



218 TENNYSOJSrS HOME, ETC. 

this all-devouring vulture revels as greedily upon the 
outer as the inner life. They must feed the appetite 
they have created. So we beg pardon for partially grati- 
fying others at his expense ; and he may somewhat re- 
"joice, as would Sydney Smith's South Sea missionary, 
if he does not disagree with the epicures that eat him. 

In his own words we exculpate our fault, and bid him 
hail and farewell. 

" Stand still, true poet that you are ; 
I know you : let me try and draw you." 





xni. 



SOME OF THE SACRED SPOTS OF ENGLAND. 




HEN I talked of visiting England I inquired of 
a travelled friend the best guide-book. " Bede's 
Chronicles," he replied. I did not at first per- 
ceive the significance of the advice. " How could chroni- 
cles composed eleven hundred years ago prepare one for 
the sight-seeings of to-day ? " But he declared it was 
worth more than all Murray's hand-books, and the thou- 
sand and one bulky and thin pictorials that waylay you 
with their vociferous but useless proffers. I followed his 
counsel, and advise all other tourists to go and do like- 
wise. The excellence of that little book is, that it gives 
you the foundation of modern, of real England. You 
are led by it to her fountain of life, — " aquce lene caput 
sacrcer It tells you why these old cathedrals stand, in 
their little, out-of-the-way towns ; and the beauty of it is 
that it does not mean to tell you aijy such thing. Writ- 
ten when the cathedrals were simple, primitive churches, 
about as magnificent as old John Street, or the first 
church of the Plymouth Pilgrims, it is simply a story 
of the planting of Christianity in pagan England ; what 
barbarous chiefs assailed it, who first submitted, who re- 
sisted ; and how the capitals of the petty principalities 
became the sees of modern bishops, the real representa- 
tives of defunct kings and kingdoms, as the Pope is of 
the dead Csesars. 

I could not follow Bede in his entire tour, for three- 



220 SOMh OF THE 

score days are not three-score of years, though it comes 
nearer to that than one would suppose, considering the 
state of the country now and then. But I followed him 
in spirit, and felt his influence from my first to my last 
look at Britain. England is exceedingly rich in these 
earliest altars; and the reverence and culture of the 
past ; the beautifully shaded and grassy tombs in which 
Nature, as it were, buries these sacred spots ; the care to 
keep them as nearly as possible as they were originally, — 
all these reproduce her primal religious life in a much 
more vivid and appropriate form than is done any- 
where else in Europe. For elsewhere the former things 
are not reproduced ; they are simply left in their native 
decay. Here they are kept up like a garden. This is 
too apparent sometimes ; and what with fences and ver- 
gers and artistic restoratives, you feel as though modern 
pietism was worse than Nature's iconoclasm. " Let the 
dead bury its dead," you. incline to say. As, for instance, 
a little modern hut is put on Herbert's Island to repre- 
sent his hermitage. It is as tasty as wealth and fastidi- 
ous mediaevalism can make it. But it is very discordant 
to the higher feelings. So St. Martin's Church at Can- 
terbury, the oldest in the kingdom, has a wooden porch 
at the entrance of the grounds that looks so ancient that 
you can easily believe King Ethelbert passed through it 
to his baptism, and Queen Bertha to her grave. And 
yet it is not five years old. I prefer ruins in ruins, and 
old spots as Time and Nature, the best of artists, put 
them. This England is too rich to allow. 

She has another reason for this, — one eminently practi- 
cal. There is an eye to the main chance in all this idola- 
try. Other things equally old and useless are decaying in 
England as fast as her cathedrals and ruined abbeys, — 
aristocracy of blood, titles, huge landed proprietaries, the 
Establishment itself. The people are outgrowing these, 
and the leaders strenuously and ceaselessly glorify the 



SACRED SPOTS OF ENGLAND. 221 

old spots and services that they may preserve the more 
important things on which they live. Tliis inordinate 
reverence may help them to retain the present titles, 
honors and possessions of the nobility of Church and 
State. Hence they keep up service twice a day in 
these village cathedrals, which nobody ever attends. 
Hence the priests intone their prayers, because the 
Papists do and the Fathers are supposed to have done. 
The Fathers fell into the " godly tone," probably un- 
consciously, through the fervor of their petitions. The 
Komans and Greeks maintain it, because, if this or any 
form be broken, all are. They, too, may have had the 
excuse of great cathedrals through which only a chant- 
ing tone can penetrate. But these do not attempt to 
fill the vault with voice, nor are there listening multi- 
tudes to hear. They, therefore, " pipe and whistle in the 
sound." There is with them no soul, as in the first, and 
no body, as with the last. Yet they hold it, as they do all 
traditions, almost above the Gospel. It is superscriptural. 
"Without it, more than without faith, it is impossible to 
please God. It helps to keep Church and State, that is, 
their soul and body, together. A good American prayer- 
meeting, lively, social, devout, is the best modern ex- 
pression of ancient worship. But such a meeting, held 
in one of these cathedrals, would break in an instant all 
the rotten strands that bind the Church and State 
together, and then what would become of our livings ? 
So, like modern fellahs, they use the mummies of their 
fathers to make the pot boil. They will all be burnt up 
soon, and then good-bye to the aristocratic swell and 
strut " that make ambition virtue." But you wish for 
observations external, not internal, — the spots, not the 
dreams dreamed upon them. 



222 SOME OF THE SACRED SPOTS 

ST. Herbert's island. 

Let us take them in the order of our visitation. 
Herbert's Island is almost as solitary to-day as when he 
hid himself there more than a thousand years ago. 
High, solemn hills, the most so of any in England, 
gather close around the dark lake of Derwent. Then 
most of the people scattered through the adjacent country 
were heathen. The Druid stones that still stand two or 
three miles distant, on a hill that overlooks the island, 
had hardly ceased to be the altars of human sacrifice. 
The crowded village of Keswick lies some two miles 
above, at the head of the lake, on a wide plain between 
the opening mountains. The village is full of activity, 
but down here one could easily imagine himself a re- 
cluse, if not transform himself into one. Here it was that 
St. Cuthbert, Bishop of Lindisfarne, came to visit his old 
and faithful friend, and, as Bede says, conversing together 
on the blessed experience of religion, " they made each 
other intoxicated in the cups of heavenly life ; " sese alter- 
utrum coelestis vitce poculis debrierunt. 

Cuthbert informs his friend that he inust soon put off 
this tabernacle, as his Lord had shown him; whereupon 
Herbert beseeches him that he would not desert him, but 
that he would pray that as they had served the Lord 
together on the earth, so He would translate them at the 
same time to heaven. They implored this favor, and 
Cuthbert received an answer to his prayers that the 
request should be granted; and the following spring, 
though they were on the extreme coasts of England, 
they left the body on the same day, and, as Bede beauti- 
fully says, together they emigrated to the Lord, — migra- 
verunt ad Dominum. This is probably a veritable event 
in the history of earnest Christian ministers ; for both of 
these were faithful preachers of the Word. Herbert's 
hermitage was not the cell of a recluse merely, but a 



OF ENGLAND. 223 

parsonage, whence he made long itineraries on a great 
circuit, preaching the .Word and training the people ; 
and Cuthbert was a most zealous minister of Jesus 
Christ. 

Fix your eyes on the little spot, well described by 
Bede even for to-day, — " insula stagni illius pergrandis 
de quo Derventionis Jluvia primordia erumpunt" — the 
island of that great lake from which the first streams of 
the Derwent issue. Remember the love-feast, the season 
of prayer, the intoxicating sweetness of Divine love, the 
presence of the Master in the little meeting, and do not 
imagine that there was no salvation on the earth before 
you experienced it, and that none will be here after you 
have migrated to the Lord. 

MELROSE : THE NEW AND THE OLD. 

By a happy juxtaposition the next really sacred place 
which we visited was the spot where these faithful 
preachers probably made their first acquaintance. It 
was at the academy whither they had come to get their 
education. The academy, theological school, and college 
were all one in those days, as in the early days of all 
churches and peoples. These lads, bright and religious, 
had been sent thither to be trained for the work of the 
ministry. The spot is the only one that I saw in Eng- 
land which had not been fenced in, or fixed up and 
spoiled by its officious proprietor. I hope he will not 
see this statement, for it may tempt him to go and ruin 
it. It is about three miles from Melrose Abbey, and is 
called Old Melrose. The Abbey, of whose ruins you 
have heard so much, was built in the twelfth century, by 
King David, of Scotland. The monks had by that time 
become rich and powerful, and the king built from policy 
more than piety. These great institutions made religion 
dependent on the State^ and helped to keep the masses 



224 SOME OF THE SACRED SPOTS 

in subjection. This was the debatable ground on which 
Scotland and England fought for centuries. It was no 
small help to the Scottish cause to have these relig- 
ious establishments scattered through the region. So 
Melrose, Jedbourgh, and Drybourgh, all within a circuit 
of ten miles, were splendid structures and amply en- 
dowed. Melrose is in the valley of the Tweed, with 
hills lifting themselves up in the rear horizon, and the 
uniform finish of a British landscape, inexpressibly quiet 
and rich, opening around. The ruins are under lock and 
key, and one has to be led round by the guide for a few 
moments where he would love to sit and muse for hours. 
I visited it twice, — by pale sunlight, and hardly paler 
moonlight, and each time the portress went tagging at my 
heels, thrusting her shilling between me and memory. 
Had she taken that and herself off, it would have been 
satisfactory ; but she acts as if afraid one would pocket 
an arch or pillar, if left to himself. Perhaps there is 
reason for this course in former vandalisms ; there might 
have been good ground for fears now ; yet it spoiled the 
picture. Oue hates to indulge in sentimentalism before 
folks, whether toward the dead or the living. I could 
not, and would not, therefore muse over Bruce's heart, or 
Douglas's dust, or arch and tracery, wassail and penance, 
prayer and plotting, all the visible and invisible, spiritual 
and material things and thoughts, that make this ruin 
their perpetual home. The quiet sentinel frightens them 
all away. The central nave was once fitted up for Pres- 
byterian worship, and the beautiful pillars are marred by 
incasing walls of rough brick. Outside lies a country 
church-yard, which connects the present to the past by 
the universal tie of death and sorrow. The arches and 
pillars yet spring light and aiiy from the earth, joining- 
no sign of heaviness with its many of decay. Like a 
light-hearted old man, bowed with years yet erect of 



OF ENGLAND. 225 

spirit, these ruins are strangely gay and graceful amid 
all their desolation. 

You cannot gaze upon them without losing much of 
the nonsense that has been poured into you about the 
darkness of the Middle Ages. No artists of stone in 
Paris or London to-day execute such works as these 
unknown architects of rude old Scotland nearly a thou- 
sand years ago. Westminster Palace or the new Louvre, 
the two greatest architectural products of this generation 
in these two greatest centres of wealth and taste, do not 
equal in general design, nor surpass in minute finish, this 
beautiful pile. They did not have railroads, newspapers, 
and other luxuries of to-day ; but they did have a lively 
sense of the beautiful, and power to embody it in endur- 
ing forms. 

But wealth and power were too much for the Melrose 
brethren, as they have been for many others before and 
since their day. They became worldly and wicked, and 
God wiped them from the earth. So will he the Church 
of to-day, if it does not profit by their example. 

We have digressed from our path, though we are on 
the road to the spot we started for. New Melrose is 
reached before Old Melrose, in time as well as in space. 
A British morning, wet with showers, yet soft and de- 
lightful notwithstanding, saw us en route from the New 
to the Old. A walk of two miles over a high hill, and 
along one of those high-walled parks full of beauty and 
seclusion, where the British aristocracy daily thank God 
that they are not as their neighbors are, brings us to a 
little gate. We enter and strike the bank of a narrow 
stream, cross a rustic bridge, follow a charming path 
through the woods, and soon reach the banks of the 
Tweed. They are quite steep and densely wooded. 
The river rolls along with a breadth and volume that is 
quite respectable. It is but a stream as compared with 
ours, yet here it justly assumes all the dignity of a river. 
15 



226 SOME OF THE SACRED SPOTS 

Following it through the woods for a mile we reach the 
spot where it makes a sudden curve, sweeping back to 
the road which we had left. 

On the extreme edge of this promontory stood the old 
monastery of Melrose. A narrow plateau is close to the 
river. The banks rise high from it. On the opposite 
side of the stream the hills rose high and rocky. All 
around were woods, and no sound but that of the river 
rattling over the rocks. I have seen no seclusion so 
complete as this. A large house stood near, but it 
was like all the houses of English gentry, as quiet as 
the landscape; not a window open, hardly a curtain 
drawn, and not a soul out of doors : so it only increased 
the solitude. 

This spot had much to do with the Christianizing of 
Britain and of Europe. Cuthbert had wandered in these 
woods, studying, reflecting, singing and praying, feeling, 
like all young Christians, a burning desire to bring the 
world to Christ. St. Boniface, the founder of the Church 
in Germany, was educated here ; and hence he departed 
on that great missionary work by which he became the 
first Luther of that land. A great multitude, of whom 
no record is kept below, have filled these hills and woods 
with their prayers and praises. It is something to stand 
in such a place ; and, though I subsequently roamed 
through Oxford and Cambridge, and drank in their de- 
licious sights and more delicious memories, and walked 
through the Sorbonne, and remembered what mighty 
scholars had given its old walls and contracted little spot 
a great name for more than six hundred years, yet 
neither of them impressed me so powerfully as this 
solitary spot, without a stone to mark it, and with but 
few records in history. The taste of those old preachers 
in selecting this site for their seminary was far better 
than that of those who afterward removed it. Forests 
filled all the region in those days, and down to within a 



OF ENGLAND. 227 

few centuries. Enough are left to vividly reproduce 
those times. We regretfully left the lonely loveliness, 
passed the house, which, from its stillness, may be the 
one where the sleeping beauty is awaiting the lover 
whose kiss shall bring her and all around her to life ; 
crossed the open lawns that are skirted by the steep and 
wooded banks, and, after a walk of two miles through 
drenching rains, reach the station near Jedbourgh Abbey. 
Scott lies there, but the rain prevents our looking upon 
his monument and the ruins in which it stands. 



LESTDISFARNE AND JARROW. 

We take the train and fly across many famous battle- 
fields, Marmion's, and others unknown to fame, where the 
English and Scotch wrestled for a thousand years ; pass 
Berwick and the Border, and soon see on our left the 
once most popular spot in England. It is Lindisfarne, 
or the Holy Island, as it is still called, where Cuthbert 
gathered a flourishing seminary, where he labored with 
unceasing assiduity, and whence he departed to meet his 
brother Herbert on their way to heaven. It is a lonff, 
crooked, barren island, yellow with sand, a few miles 
from the shore. It looks as if it was almost entirely un- 
inhabited, and as if it was impossible for it to have ever 
been an ecclesiastical centre, — the seat of the Conference 
when he was elected bishop, and renowned in the history 
of the Church for centuries. Its sanctity was doubtless 
largely connected with the pilgrimages made to it after 
his death. The island is but half an island, being joined 
to the shore by a tongue of land, that at low tides is 
bare. Remains of Cuthbert's monastery still exist, and 
are described by Scott in his Marmion : — 

" In Saxon strength the abbey frowned, 
With massive arches broad and round 
That rose alternate, row and row, 
On ponderous columns, short and low, 



228 SOME OF TEE SACRED SPOTS 

Built e^e the art was known, 
By pointed aisle, and shafted stalk, 
The aroades of an alley'd walk 

To emulate in stone." 

In those walls he makes the abbot bury alive the in 
constant Constance. Within them long ruled the found- 
ers of the see of Durham, and against them raged many 
an olden storm of war. In these days, when the heir 
to the throne of these lands makes a Dane the heiress, 
those ancient wars of Saxon and Dane around these 
ruins come fresh and piquant to the thought, — 

" On the deep walls, the heathen Dane 
Had poured his impious rage in vain." 

Still another and later heroism floats around the isle. 
Grace Darling has given it a place in modern story : for 
it was off its light that she wrought the deed of courage 
and devotion that has made her the theme of pencil and 
of pen. Cuthbert's brave spirit thus yet walks the isle, 
and thrills its dwellers with his zeal and daring. 

A few miles bring us to Newcastle. Six miles below 
this city, on the road to Durham, is a little, gray 
stone church, with its usual square tower, standing in an 
open, flat country, in the midst of the low and dingy 
houses of miners and shippers. This is the parish 
church of Jarrow, and close beside it stood the once 
leading monastery in Britain, where Bede lived and 
wrote, and whence, in the language of his pupil and 
biographer, he migrated to the celestial kingdom. No 
contrast could be greater than between this spot and 
Old Melrose. Ships, colliers, trains, factories, all the life 
of a seaport and a thriving factory village, surrounded 
the old church. The landscape was without attraction. 
A few trees skirted the horizon, and slightly relieved the 
tameness of Nature and the bustle of man. In that 
church a chair and table of the Venerable Bede are kept, 
but their authenticity is doubtful. Perhaps, after all, 



OF ENGLAND. 229 

Jarrow is nearer like what those practical Fathers desired 
than Melrose. It is surrounded by souls struggling with 
sin ; and one would most perfectly imitate them, and se- 
cure their and their Master's approval, who should spend 
his days in active service here rather than in seclusion 
there. 

A ride of ten miles brings us to Durham. In its 
cathedral are the. professed graves of Bede and Cuth- 
bert. The encroachment of the waves at Lindisfarne was 
the pretended cause of their transfer, the profitableness 
of their bodies, as objects of veneration, the real reason. 
Bede was stolen by a presbyter and brought hither; 
Cuthbert was transferred in state. No shrine in Eng- 
land was as popular as his except that of Thomas ^ 
Becket, four hundred years afterward. The spot where 
he lay is back of the choir, and there he was found but 
a few years ago, arrayed in costly apparel and decked 
with gems. Bede's tomb is in the Galilee, a sort of 
lecture-room for vespers. A plain sarcophagus stands in 
the central aisle. On it is written, in rhyming Latin, 

" Hac sunt in fossa 
Bedse venerabilis ossa." 

It so happens that the bones are not in that "ditch," 
as the rhymes compelled the writer to say, but they are 
probably in some other one ; for no one knows where his 
dust is, it having been scattered, like much other such in 
Europe, by the irreverent democratic tornadoes that have 
blown away so many crowued heads of the living and 
tombs of the dead. 

The stately cathedral is the fitting monument of their 
virtues ; but the bustling Jarrow, or silent and solitary 
Holy Island, is a far more appropriate resting-place. 



230 SOME OF THE SACRED SPOTS 

YOKK MINSTER. 

York is one of the two culminations of the ancient 
holy places. To York, these Melrose, Derwentwater, 
Durham, and Jarrow monks ever turned reverential eyes. 
This was their Metropolitan See. The chiefs of their 
nation and of their church here reigned. This too was 
their fountain-head. Brought from 'far distant Kent, 
and from a hostile power, the sacred truth here first 
struck its roots in the soil of Northern Britain. 

Then too, undoubtedly, as now, the chief temple of 
the realm was standing here ; and Bede and Cuthbert 
in their pilgrimages probably had visited the capitol of 
their nation and church, and worshipped on the very 
spot where the most magnificent of English temples 
stands. 

York Minster stands high up on the bank of a narrow 
river. It is not on a hill, but on the levelish uplands. 
Figures will not help you much, yet they are all we 
have. On this spot, conceive a building nearly six hun- 
dred feet long, with transepts of four hundred feet. The 
towers are of proportionate breadth and loftiness, and all 
finished in the most carefully wrought tracery of stone, 
giving a light and airy look to the whole immensity. 
Enter, and an open hall receives you, ninety feet high, 
and hundreds of feet wide and long, without a seat, or 
aught save immense pillars to interrupt the gaze. You 
may well take your hat from your head. The spot is 
worthy of veneration, not for itself, but for Him to whom 
it was built. Richly painted windows, lofty and brill- 
iant, are on either hand. Before you is said to be the 
largest window in the world, seventy feet high and thirty- 
five feet wide, larger than the area of many a church, 
and full of paintings that give almost every incident in 
the Bible in their panels. 

A money item may convey better notion of the extent 



OF ENGLAND. 231 

of this pile. Being Americans, you are supposed, by 
this non-penny-loving people, to be peculiarly moneyish. 
But I find they talk money as much as we do, and seek 
it in ways to which poverty does not constrain our people. 

This cathedral has been set on fire twice within 
twenty years ; once by a maniac, and once by accident. 
When the fire was discovered, no engines could reach 
it, so high was it, and the roof, the only part not of 
stone, fell in. To replace this required an outlay of 
$750,000. This was only to build a roof over the nave. 
Here is another element. A year or two ago the Arch- 
bishop preached a charity sermon, and seven thousand 
five hundred persons stood on these pavements, yet was 
not the place full. 

Many historic remains are here. Among them are a 
drinking-horn of a Saxon king of the seventh century, and 
the chair in which these kings were crowned, as homely 
and as revered as Harvard's legacy of Parson Turell. 

Underneath are portions of the previous edifices, back 
to Edwin of Deira, celebrated by Alexander Smith. 
Even the pagan times beyond pay their tribute to their 
victor ; for a heathen altar is under the church. This 
was the royal seat of the king of the Angles ; and, upon 
his conversion, he established his first church on the site 
of his heathen temple. Here Christ has been wor- 
shipped for nearly twelve hundred years. Here is He 
worshipped yet. Though when one hears, as I did, a 
band of boys and men, with dirty white gowns on, and 
two or three priests or deacons in those but a little 
cleaner, going through the service in the humdrumest 
way possible, to half a dozen most disinterested auditors, 
I thought that the spirit and the letter were thoroughly 
separated. How silly, not to say blasphemous, all such 
worship seems ! The fact is, the original use of these 
great structures has passed away. Built in the Middle 
Ages, when religion, as now with Eomanists, was in 



232 SOME OF THE SACRED SPOTS 

sight, not sound ; built for crowds, who, catching a 
glimpse of officiating priests, secured thereby salvation, 
they have lost their power among a Protestant people. 
They are admired and talked about as the English ad- 
mire a great many other useless things, such as ruins, 
castles, and "royal" and "noble" families. However, 
we can rejoice that this spot, for more than a thousand 
years, has been consecrated to the service of the Saviour ; 
and we trust that as long as the world stands, shall 
stand here an altar of Christ's, and more than ever 
before it shall be the birthplace and growth-place of 
myriads of souls. 

EPWORTH. 

It is an easy transition from the marshes of Jarrow, 
the empty sarcophagus at Durham, and the emptier 
splendors of York, to the low swells of Epworth ; even 
if we pass over a thousand years in passing over that 
score or two of miles. It was no small matter to find 
this hamlet. It is a Nazareth yet, though a century 
and a half have passed since it became the birthplace 
of " the greatest ecclesiastical genius since Hildebrand," 
and a far greater than he, because the Protestant was a 
restorer, not a destroyer of the faith. While at York, 
I felt a natural curiosity to see the spot whence sprung 
the reviver of the true religion, the reanimator of a dy- 
ing faith, the more than Saint Augustine, or any saint 
in Papal or Churchman's calendar. Yet, although Ep- 
worth is only about twenty-five miles from York, I 
could find nobody that could tell me how to get to it. 
At the railroad, hotel, and even Wesleyan Chapel, there 
was equal ignorance. The Wesleyan minister was not 
at home, or I should probably have had less trouble; 
but the sexton, and several members to whom I applied, 
were all ignorant of their birthplace. After much search- 
mg, I got partly on the track, but by misdirection was 



OF ENGLAND. 238 

left at Goole, fifteen miles from the place, at six o'clock 
of a Saturday evening, with no means of conveyance 
but those supplied by Nature. It was a beautiful May 
night, and I was determined to spend the Sunday at 
Epworth. So I mounted a sort of country express 
wagon, and started for Crowle, six miles from Epworth, 
and whither I should have been carried by the cars. 
The rustic wagon went but a short way in the direction 
I desired, and left me by the side of a great dike, along 
which a walk of eight miles would lead me to the 
village of Crowle. I took my staff and travelled on, 
beguiling the way with the glories of a summer sunset, 
the calm and rural beauty of a rich though lowly nature, 
and the thought that possibly Wesley in his early, if 
not later life, had walked over the same path. Sunlight 
and twilight had both left the world to darkness and to 
me ere I touched the desired village. A great fair was 
to come off Monday, and the preliminary crowds, with 
their booths, and games, and lusus naturcsy were already 
on the ground. So there was no room for me at any 
of the inns, and I must needs walk four miles further 
before I could find a bed. Near midnight a wayside 
tavern gave me a poor but cleanly welcome, though a 
room full of neighboring boors made the house hideous 
over their beer. 

The Sabbath sun, bells, and scenery, all made me 
forget the toilsome midnight walk and the disgusting 
midnight revellings, as the blessed sun, and scenes and 
sounds of the heavenly Sabbath, will make us forget 
the dreary night of sorrow and drearier sights of sin 
which have wearied and worried our earthly state. The 
flat country on which we had walked all the previous 
evening began to rise slightly. The gray tower of the 
church appeared on one of the most considerable of the 
knolls, with trees scantily covering its northern and 
eastern sides, but thickly shading its southern front. At 



234 SOME OF THE SACRED SPOTS 

its foot were the crowded streets of an English town, 
with their red-tiled roofs blazing in the sun. This W£is 
Epworth Church and village, the birthplace and youth- 
place of John Wesley. It is a small place of half a 
dozen streets, compact together, and void of beauty, as 
are all British villages. 

The church stands outside of it, on its northeastern 
limit. Its entrance is throtigh a row of lofty sycamores 
and elms. The chimes cease their cheerful rattling, and 
the few homespun villagers enter the antique porch. It 
is a very old edifice, with but little architectural comeli- 
ness. Its bare walls and rafters look as though they had 
been untouched long before the days when the bright 
Johnny and Charley, with the other children of the rec- 
tor's family, used to be led hither by their pious and 
lovely mother. : 

I could easily reproduce the scenes of more than a 
century and a half ago. The stern and stately rector, 
the meek but resolute matron, the crowd of little ones, 
with the more thoughtful faces of the two lads, were all 
before me. A later period in its history and theirs I also 
reproduced : when the pale youths, having returned from 
Oxford in holy orders, opened their mission among their 
early acquaintance, in the presence of their venerated 
parents. And a yet later, when one of the same young 
men was dragged from the pulpit and thrust out of the 
church by his father's servants and successor. 

The rector, an amiable gentleman so far as appear- 
ance went, read the service in a reverent manner, and 
also the earnest exhortation of the Prayer-Book to the 
little congregation to remain to the Sacrament. He did 
not preach, and the congregation did not stay. Less than 
twenty tarried to the communion. The altar was in a 
small recess back of the body of the church, and there 
we felt still more deeply our affinity with the worship- 
pers of ^hat generation. 



OF ENGLAND. 235 

Leaving the church by its chancel porch, and step- 
ping a few feet to your left, you stand beside Samuel 
"Wesley's tomb. It is a plain slab, on a brick base, with 
a too long inscription, under an old, fine-spreading tree, 
close to the door of the vestry. The story goes that that 
was the door out of which John Wesley was put by the 
authorities of the church, and that he instantly mounted 
the low slab beside it and proclaimed the Word from that 
far more sacred pulpit. Some dents in the stone, caused 
by the presence of iron ore in it, are said by the villagers 
to be the print of Wesley's feet. Very earnestly and 
honestly did a lad make me this declaration. It shows 
how easy legends could become subjects of faith in a 
more credulous age. If such a story could be believed 
by anybody, as it undoubtedly is in Protestant England 
to-day, we must be lenient to the credulity of earlier 
ages and less enlightened climes. I have seen, since, 
a small white slab, a foot and a half square, on which 
were most clearly the impress of feet ; no mere flaw or 
dent, but two solidly touching feet. It is the stone, so 
called, on which Christ stood when he met Peter, a mile 
out of Rome, who was fleeing from the martyrdom that 
he saw was coming. It is not strange that such a slab 
should be worshipped by a multitude of believers. Hu- 
man nature is much the same everywhere. There are 
greater fools than these in America, as mesmerizers and 
manipulators can testify. It does not need a footstep or 
a flaw to make their converts. 

The view from this hill is the best which the town 
affords. Low knolls rise around you. Windmills girt 
the horizon. The pastures are free from the offensive 
high walls which mar the beauty of English landscapes. 
The aristocratic, absorbing landowner is not found here. 
As in France and America, the people own the soil they 
cultivate ; and they need no monstrous prison walls be- 
tween their tiny lots. Tl^ northern and western hori- 



236 SOME OF TEE SACRED SPOTS 

zon gathers itself up into low hills, but the east and 
south glides down into ocean meadows. The town is 
really on what was an island, and was not unfrequently 
isolated by the tides, so near is it to the German Ocean. 
The island, which is called Axholme, has of late years 
been joined to the mainland, but it still has all the char^ 
acteristics of such situations. 

We pass down the deep-shaded avenue, and find our 
way to the Wesleyan Chapel. Two rival Methodist 
bodies flourish here, — the Wesleyans and the Kilham- 
ites. The last are the New Connection Methodists, I 
believe. Their founder was a native of Ep worth, and 
revolted early from his allegiance to his townsman, and 
established an independent body that is quite flourishing. 
Their chapel here is much handsomer than that of the 
Wesleyans. The latter are a worthy body of disciples ; 
some of them are of the leading classes, and all that I 
met are godly and affectionate Christians. 

In the heart of the village are the pleasant grounds 
of the rectory. Like all such gardens of delight in 
England, they are shut from all eyes by very high, 
blank walls. I wished to look on the spot where Wes- 
ley was born, and the house where he spent his early 
years ; so I lifted the latch of the gate, and entered un- 
invited and unwelcomed. The house is a plain brick 
edifice, standing a few rods from the street. Before it 
spreads a level lawn, more than a hundred feet square, 
with a walk around it shaded with venerable trees and 
lined with shrubbery and flowers. A vegetable garden 
on the north, and pastures on the east, complete the 
rural picture. The house was the same that Samuel 
Wesley built after the one was destroyed by fire from 
which John was saved. His living was evidently valu- 
able, and the family exclusive and superior to their 
rustic neighbors. The present rector is the son of 
a lord, and the present v|^ue of the living is about 



OF ENGLAND. 237 

iMS'llOO, or over $5000 : it was correspondingly valuable 
,in the days of Wesley. So the Methodist pioneer was, 
ill the English sense of the word, a gentleman ; and his * 
life, in view of the intense pride and exclusiveness of 
rcaste, was the more remarkable and honorable. The 
ghosts that troubled the Wesley family were long since 
laid. The comfortable mansion looks as though it was 
above such intrusions. It is not stately nor spacious, 
^though sufficiently ample and convenient. A single par- 
lor, with an entry by the side of it, a like room behind 
it, wings in the rear, all of fair width and height, — such 
is the house where John Wesley received his first and 
ichief education. There the child gambolled, the boy 
studied, the youth meditated, the man struggled and tri- 
umphed, and went forth a chosen vessel to bear truth 
and grace to unnumbered myriads and generations. 

A memorial church should be erected to his memory 
here. No son of England deserves it more. The 
^society need it, and would aid in the enterprise. A 
^window to the memory of the rector and his wife should 
be in the church, — a costly Gothic temple should bear 
his name. I trust the enterprise will be inaugurated by 
his disciples in England. It will meet with a hearty 
response in America. 



BEDFORD AND EL STOW. 

These spots should not fail of a place in the sacred 
sites of England. Though not connected with a great 
reformer or church-organizer, they are with the most 
imaginative mind that she has dedicated exclusively to 
the service of Christ. Milton had a divided duty ; 
Jeremy Taylor, Cowper, Charles Wesley, were each 
less endowed with creative power. The Baptist minis- 
ter, poor, ignorant, ignominious in calling, a long time 
captive, and worker with his hands in arduous toil, was 



238 SOME OF THE SACRED SPOTS 

far beyond, in God-given powers, the greatest of the 
peers or prelates who scorned and scourged him. Ban- 
yan's home must hang in your picture-gallery. It was 
winter ere I saw it. Winding round from Cambridge 
to Liverpool, I found it in my homeward track. It is 
an hour's ride from Cambridge, over the Bedford level, 
flat and fat as the prairies, Holland, or Egypt. One 
route led through St. Ives ; I mistakingly took the other, 
and so missed the sight of the great procession of the 
seven wives, and their perfect progression of sacks, cats, 
and kits, which saluted the bewildered eyes of Mrs. 
Goose in her itinerary hither. How anxiously would 
that part of my vision that has not yet put away its 
childishness, gaze at the seat of this most ridiculous and 
puzzling of puzzles, — the happiest satire in our lan- 
guage on a swollen style that has not yet passed away. 
Huntington, the birthplace of Cromwell, and Northamp- 
ton, the home of Doddridge, are on that route. In this 
wide level grew most of the mighty spirits that won 
what of civil and religious liberty both this nation and 
ours enjoy. It is a favorite conceit of the poets that 
mountains are the home of liberty ; but it is not so in 
England. Her experience gives this honor to her plains. 
These low and often watery meadows bred her Crom- 
well, Hampton, Bunyan, Wesley, Cowper, Baxter, and 
other renowned defenders of civil and Christian freedom. 
It was also the seat of the great Puritan emigration to 
New England. The names of English towns transferred 
to Massachusetts and Connecticut, are almost exclusively 
from these HoUandish counties ; and Cambridge, which, 
as compared with. Oxford, is the seat of liberality and 
reform, is in the same prairie. The poets will have to re- 
vise their songs, in view of Flemish and English history. 
Bedford is a brisk town, of about twelve thousand in- 
habitants ; through it sleepily steals the Ouse. A wide 
street, lined with one-story cottages, leads from the depot 



OF ENGLAND. 239 

to the bridge. Beyond it, the street grows narrower, build- 
ings taller, and bustle livelier. Quite stately churches 
occupy open squares, and costly stores line the thorough- 
fares. But not the old and ornate church, nor the tall 
stone stores, have drawn us hither. A spirit rules it 
whose body lies in the centre of noisy London. Two 
places in the City attract our eyes and feet, — his church 
and his prison. The first was built for him soon after 
his release from jail. It is situated on Mill Street, a 
little one side of the main street, and like the present 
bridge only in location, reminds us of him who has made 
it immortal. A few years ago the original Bunyan 
Chapel was taken down, and a neat, brick edifice took 
.its place. The lecture-room contains an old-fashioned, 
high-backed, narrow-bottomed chair, such as. are common 
enough in the old houses of New England, in which 
Bunyan had often sat, and a table at which he had often 
written. I seated myself in the chair beside the table, 
and tried to fancy the fancies of that seething brain. 

Going back to the bridge, the Howard Chapel is 
passed, and I learn for the first time that this philanthro- 
pist was a native of the county. His seat is not far 
from town. He built himself a chapel, and preached in 
it before and probably during his world-wide labors. 
So the great reforms in social morals spring from the 
same fount whence rises the other purifying streams of 
this yet far from purified commonwealth. The bridge is 
the pivot of Bedford, geographically and historically. A 
narrow roadway till within a few years occupied the 
place of this broad and handsome structure. On its 
central pier stood a little, low stone hut. That hut was 
the den, in which, just about two hundred years ago, a 
poor illiterate preacher was cast for telling his neighbors 
what great things God had done for his soul ; and there 
he dreamed a dream, which, like a prophet's vision, all 
the world has read, and will read with increasing admira- 



240 SOME OF THE SACRED SPOTS 

tion to the end of time. The building and bridge are 
gone, but the lazy Ouse, whose waters were consecrated 
with his baptism, still roams and sleeps within its wind- 
ing banks, with their coverlet of softest green, and their 
curtains of overhanging willows. Its pensive and perfect 
beauty was no unapt type of the river of the water of life 
which his eyes saw, and where his soul walked when shut 
up in the damp and dirty dungeon between its shores. 
One easily reproduces the bobbin-weaver and his blind 
child, the rapt seer, the busy penman, seeking all sorts 
of scraps whereon to cast his burning thoughts, — the 
praying, exulting, peaceful man of God. No poet haunt 
of Britain, whether grand as Wordsworth's or dainty as 
Tennyson's, compares with this gliding stream. 

But Bedford does not give the whole nor the best of 
Bunyan. Like most great men, from Antseus till now, 
he draws his strength from the soil. The rustic village, 
not the dense and busy city, is his real home. Fortu- 
nately too the village is all unchanged. It shows the 
stability of European habits outside the rushing chan- 
nels, that not two miles from a thriving country town is 
a little hamlet scarcely altered for at least two hundred 
years. 

Leaving the town and the bridge, coming back through 
the broad street, lined with red-tiled cottages to the sta- 
tion-house, I strike out on the open meadows. Though 
it was January, the farmers were busy harrowing and 
setting out cabbage-plants, unmindful of frost or snow. 
The open champaign is sprinkled with trees, and " all 
the air a slumberous stillness holds." Though mid-day, 
everything is as drowsy as at evening. A half-hour's 
walk over a broad, smooth, winding road, brought me to 
a street thinly sprinkled with thatched-roofed, clay-walled 
cottages, unworthy most of them of human habitation. 
One of the smallest of them stood by itself, at the en- 
trance of the village, on the right hand of the street. It 



OF ENGLAND. 241 

is very small, and thatched with ancient straw trans- 
formed into soil and grass. Near the south corner 
crouches a door. Two small windows are in front, two 
smaller ones in the little garabril roof above. A neigh- 
bor opposite furnishes the key, the poor proprietor having 
l^itely left for Australia. There are two rooms about 
eight feet square and six feet high, with a bit of pantry 
or closet going out of one of them. From the corner 
near the door, and beside the grate, stairs go up into the 
attics, as may be often seen in an ancient New England 
farm-house. Only these were on the petty scale upon which 
everything is constructed. Stooping our way upward we 
find two cramped bedrooms, lighted each by a four- 
paned window. Outside, at the corner nearest the street, 
but within the enclosure, his forge stood till within a few 
years. It was built up against the house. Behind this 
hut — scarcely larger than the other den where he was 
stived — is a little plat a hundred feet by thirty, with a 
few apple-trees, some withered weeds and esculents, a 
ragged hedge, and the swollen hillocks of departed pota- 
toes. This is the home of Bunyan. Here he lived 
after his early marriage, when a dissolute youth and 
dreadful blasphemer ; here he lived when haled to prison, 
and here he is said to have continued to live when he 
was the be-praised author of poems and allegories, the 
popular pastor of Bedford town, and the most crowd- 
drawing preacher of London. We looked on its humble 
walls and wondered that no names had profaned them. 
Irving, Scott, and Byron could not keep theirs from 
the but little larger and no comelier walls of Shakspeare's 
house. How is it that neither they nor 'others have 
visited and thus adorned this shrine ? The second imag- 
ination of his age, if second, the higher than Shakspeare 
in heart and purpose, his cottage is left to the rude 
chances or necessities of the poor peasantry among whom 
he lived. Perhaps it is better thus than petted and pro- 
16 



242 SOME OF THE SACRED SPOTS 

tected, as is that of Burns, by the class that, were he 
living, would scorn to recognize him. He stiU dwells 
among his own people. Though it seems to us that if 
any cottage in England should be rescued from destruc- 
tion by living hands, the Christians of Britain should 
hasten to embalm this. For a trifle it could be bought 
and preserved. Let them beware that it is not neglected 
until it is too late. 

Passing down the silent street a few rods, and a bend 
to the left opens into a wider road ; one side faced with 
like crowded and petty cottages, and the other occupied 
with the old church of Elstow. Very old and dilapi- 
dated is the Grothic pile. It is after the style of Gras- 
mere, Epworth, and most such churches in the country 
parishes of England, — very rude and simple : a nave, 
a rough stone floor, rough wooden pillars and ceiling. 
Yet it has a rudimentary grace that the primitive abomi- 
nations of our fathers never achieved. You can see how 
this can grow into something grand and lovely. The 
child is father of the man. The unspeakable majesty 
and tenderness of York and Cologne dwell in this poor 
and miniature nave and aisle and fretted roof. 

One feature of it differs from any of its fellows that 
I have seen. The bell-tower stands apart from the 
church, like a campanile of Italy. It is a plain, square, 
half ruinous mass of stone, lifting itself a hundred feet 
or so out of the spacious green that lies before the church. 
This drop-down pile is full of history. It was while 
playing beneath it on a Sabbath afternoon, and pouring 
out a flood of profanity, that young Bunyan heard a 
voice out of heaven, as distinctly as Paul did on the plains 
of Damascus, '' It is hard for thee to kick against the 
pricks," sound through his soul also : a voice which his 
companions, like Paul's, heard not, but which he, like 
him, instantly and zealously obeyed. 

Sabbath games were common then upon this green, — 



OF ENGLAND. 243 

a relic of a yet hardly extirpated popery. They were 
the fierce and brutal games of the British populace two 
hundred years ago, — bear-baiting, boxing, dog-fighting, 
cock-fighting, and kindred pleasantries. The most reck- 
less and blasphemous of the Elstow youths, the beggarly 
son of a beggarly tinker, in the very height of his blas- 
phemies, received his call from God. Who could have 
thought the richest brain in Europe burned under that 
unkempt head ? Who could have dreamed that the 
loftiest imagination, save one, of that century was hiding 
its wings behind that fiery eye ? Surely God here, as 
so often elsewhere, delights to make " the weak things 
of the world confound the things which are mighty; 
and base things, and things which are despised, hath 
God chosen, yea, and things which are not, to bring to 
nought things that are ; that no flesh should glory in His 
presence." 

Before I stood under this staggering tower, I had 
visited many a spot consecrated as the birthplace of the 
regenerated soul : where Peter was called, and John ; 
where Moses saw the Lord, and Abraham ; where Lu- 
ther was born again, and Wesley, and Calvin, and many 
of the world's mightiest; yet none was more sublimely 
simple than this unfenced, uncared-for Elstow green. 
Nowhere had God come nearer to earth ; nowhere had he 
plucked, as from the burning, a more blazing brand, which 
had become in his hand a more blazing star. As the 
tall sons of Jesse were passed by, and the insignificant 
David elected, so all England's greatness was contempt- 
uously disregarded, and the vilest member of her lowest 
rank, hardly above the gipsy, whose vocation he followed, 
was crowned by the unseen hands of inspiration, amid 
the boisterous revelries of his undiscerning associates. 

Stand here, then, reverently. Look on that ancient, 
lowly, poverty-stricken church. See those grassy pas- 
tures that lie idly around, deep-shaded by thick-sprinkled 



244 SOME OF THE SACRED SPOTS 

trees. Feel the depth of stillness that rests down upon 
the scene almost like a shroud. Out of its calm, as from 
these barrows of ancestral dead at your feet, recreate 
the noisy activities of that Sabbath-breaking hour ; and 
let the whole life then flashing into being, as if the 
burdened brain were cleft by the stroke of the Spirit, 
shine out upon you, while you bow in silent awe and 
praise at the marvellousness and mystery of the provi- 
dence and grace of God. 

Before leaving Bedford I ought to chronicle an incident 
that convinced me that the spirit of the sires of England's 
Great Rebellion lives yet in their sons. Walking up the 
main street, I inquired of a lame man, who was rushmg 
past me with all the energy of a Yankee, where Bunyan's 
Chapel was. On his directing me, I remarked that 
I was an American. " North or South ? " said he. 
" Neither," said I ; " a United States American." " Why 
did n't you say that before ? " said he. " I would have 
introduced you to that large, white-coated man going up 
the other side of the street. He is a great Union man ; 
so am I. It is the aristocracy that wants the Confeder-^ 
acy acknowledged. If they acknowledge it, we shall 
revolt." " Revolt ! " I answer ; " what will that amount 
to ? They say up in London, John Bright has no friends." 
" John Bright," he replies, " can march more millions to 
London than they can rally against him ! " His eyes 
flashed, as his soul, on fire, blazed from their windows. 
He knew what " revolt " meant. Cromwell and his 
fellows had taught him that. This purpose alone has 
prevented Britain's intervention. Her poorer classes, 
with these earnest radicals of the middle class, have 
filled her aristocracy with fears, and stayed the impulses 
of their pride and dread. They will yet be the instru- 
ments of England's reojeneration. 

A' run of a hundred miles southward brings us, in five 
hours, to London, over the country which Wesley and 



OF ENGLAND. 245 

Bunyau had often travelled in hardly less than as many 
days. We need not stop here long if we are searching 
for shekinahs. 

One would suppose that such a city would have among 
its historic spots many that are sacred. But great cities 
are not centres of great reforms. Rome and Jerusalem 
are the only two that have religious fame ; and of these 
one has always, and the other for more than a millen- 
nium, has been exclusively religious. But London, like 
Paris and New York, has but little interest to the re- 
ligious antiquarian. St. Paul's, with the vainest monu- 
ments in Europe, except those of Venice ; Westminster 
Abbey, with its pompous dust ; each slightly relieved by 
a few holy and renowned names, ate all that ancient 
London piety offers us : and yet we err. For two spots 
within its circuit are as holy as any in the land. 

BTJNHILL FIELDS AND SMITHFIELD. 

The first is a close-packed, homely burying-ground, 
thrust upon a noisy street, which begrudges the space 
to the dead which it could, with more seeming profit, fill 
with the living. Opposite to it, standing back from the 
street, is Wesley's City Road Chapel, the cradle of 
Methodism. Beside the lawn before the chapel is the 
parsonage, where he died ; and behind it the crowded 
yard where he lies among his chief disciples, — Watson, 
Clark, Benson, Bunting, and other followers, — a silent 
congregation, as numerous and as sacred as that which 
filled the neighboring walls on his last appearance therein. 
Bunyan lies in the opposite yard, and so Epworth and 
Elstow meet in this common mart of mortality and man. 
Wesley's mother and Dr. Watts sleep beside Bunyan ; 
the three, with her son opposite, representing the four 
grand divisions of Protestantism that in their living 
unity, as these in their dead, shall yet renew every land 



246 SOME OF THE SACRED SPOTS 

in righteousness. The house where Wesley lived and 
died is a comfortable brick edifice, such as is common 
to city streets. The plain and spacious chamber where 
he met his fate looks but little like the ornate room 
made familiar in the picture of his death. Probably 
the satin damask coverlet and the somewhat theatrical 
air of the mourners, and even of the patriarch himself^ 
are equally imaginative. 

An older death-bed than this, and a more worthy, be- 
cause more heroic, is in the busiest part of the ancient 
town. If we start from Newgate, where some of the 
martyrs — John Rogers was one — were imprisoned, we 
shall pass over the road up which they walked on their last 
journey. It is not far from the prison, behind High Hol- 
born and the hill that makes that high. It is a square 
of moderate dimensions, and that space immoderately re- 
duced by scores of cattle-pens. Bartholomew's Hospital 
still presents its dingy front upon the western side. 
Before its gates was the history enacted that has made 
the humble acre a true God's acre, more divine than 
common cemeteries, more even than most of the sacred 
land, manifold more than the sites of merely civil martyr- 
dom. The air is full, not of its present grossness, but 
of heavenly fragrance and freshness. We see not the 
bleating victims of man's daily appetites, but the solemn, 
sweet-faced martyrs. We hear only sacred and celestial 
melodies. The sin and degradation that oppress the 
outward senses drop from the spirit, as the lark leaves 
its earthliness behind, while she wings her way, through 
faith, to the heaven of heavens. 

This altar, where Christianity endured its fiery test, 
and where the key-stone of its triumphal arch was 
placed, fittingly precedes the last of our sacred places 
and the first of hers, — 



OF ENGLAND. 247 

CANTERBTIRT. 

I could not make my pilgrimage hither after the 
fashion of Chaucer, though the starting-point was not 
far from his. Southwark, where his parting tavern 
stood, is but little above the station of the South Eastern 
•jKailway. Crossing, as he did, the London Bridge, 
whose high-barred gate, long since removed, was then 
probably adorned with human heads, the victims of royal 
or priestly tyranny, we find the " Tabard Inn " of to-day 
to be an immense depot, elegant and crowded. Less 
reverent, but more numerous, are the caravans that now 
ply to the ancient shrine ; but no poet of wit and fancy 
hies with them to beguile the journey, or to publish his 
itinerary. By the plain and homely prose of the cars, 
it is a run of a few hours, a halt, and all is over. The 
pilgrimage hither is ended. The rattling trains are 
bitterly hostile to rhyming and story-telling. So we 
silently enjoy the fields swimming past us, full to the 
brim with landscape beauty. 

The city we seek lies in a hollow, surrounded on 
every side by moderately high hills. The valley is less 
than five miles in diameter. The hills are evidently of 
oceanic origin, and point to a time when the waters pre- 
vailed here. Into this vale, the capital of the ancient 
kingdom of Kent, Augustine came, sent by the Bishop 
of Rome to revive the flickering, if not already extinct 
faith of the islanders. His eflbrts succeeded. The Queen, 
and then the King, accepted the faith ; a metropolitan 
church arose ; the King's daughter married the King of 
the Angles, whose seat was York; her confessor at- 
tended her ; her husband was converted, and Christianity 
thus planted itself in the extremes of the island. Rome 
absorbed the previous schools and churches into herself. 
Her administrative and autocratic genius easily assumed 
the reins, and the seats of these, her first royal children, 



SOME OF THE SACRED SPOTS 

became the centres of her Church. They have retained 
their preeminence, despite the decline of their political 
sovereignty and the overthrow of Papal domination. 
The Archbishop of Canterbury is now, what he was in 
the days of Thomas a Becket, the Primate of all Eng- 
land, the first peer of the realm. 

Through the vale in which the town sleeps, as in a 
cradle, steals a thread-like stream, dignified with the title 
of river. Near the middle of the valley is a small, thick 
cluster of ancient houses, out of whose midst rise the 
great towers of the cathedral. As with the other 
cathedral towns, the church seems to have exhausted 
the capacities of the people. More than at York is it 
the case here. There factories and a busy population 
reduce in some degree the pretensions of the church; 
but here the cathedral has it all to itself. A mile out, 
on the road to London, is the hill where Chaucer says 
he first saw the city, and from which Henry made his 
pilgrimage on foot to the tomb of Becket. At that spot 
it looks as if the church stood alone in the meadows. Its 
towers pierce as one shaft the heavens, and the village 
hides herself in its ample robes. When one gets nearer, 
the power of the hamlet is more clearly seen. It has 
its revenge. So closely does it crowd upon the church, 
that from no side is there an impressive approach to it. 

Through the old gate, covered with grotesque inscrip- 
tions of the Middle Ages, we enter a court incased with 
high walls and lined with rude dwellings. In its centre, 
but a few feet from the wall, is the cathedral. All the 
effect of open space is lost. From no point near or 
remote, can the eye take in its full stature from founda- 
tion to topstone. It is not preeminently grand either 
within or without. Its size and general effect give it a 
majestic air. But its impression is feeble in comparison 
with that of York and many on the continent. The error 
is carried within. Though really of great length, it is so 



OF ENGLAND. 249 

built across at the choir as to appear short. By the side 
of the choir, steps lead to the shrine of Thomas a 
Becket, once the most attractive in Europe. Naught is 
left of shrine or dust : the indentations made by multi- 
tudinous knees on the rocky pavement alone attest the 
general idolatry of Catholic England. The chapel, where 
he was killed, was by the side, and below the high altar, 
now the choir. While in the act of performing vespers 
at its altar, he was struck down by officers sent from 
Henry to expostulate with him, but who, finding him 
obdurate, took this effectual way of winning their case. 
It was really effective ; for in spite of royal pilgrimages 
and the papal consecration of the Archbishop, the power 
of the Papacy was weakened by the blow^ and never 
rallied again to its former and everywhere else excessive 
assumptions. 

The score of houses that surround the cathedral give 
shelter to the many useless appendages to its service. 
Twenty or thirty singers daily cry aloud to empty walls. 
A dozen priests whine the service to the same audience, 
and all must be supported. Besides, the Archbishop 
must live in state at London; and so many here pay 
tribute to the cathedral. It is a bloated old spider that 
sits in its dusty cobweb eating modern flies, who feel 
themselves honored by gratifying its aristocratic palate 
and filling its ecclesiastical maw. 

Nothing is more ludicrously senile than the cathe- 
dral service of England. In Catholic countries the 
masses yet believe in the services, and so the cathedrals 
always have some worshippers, and often crowds. In 
England they are as empty as deserted halls. They 
should be fenced in, as are other ruins, and left in their 
sepulchre. 

There is another antique here far more interesting 
than the cathedral. It is the feeble beginning of Eng- 
lish Christianity. She is very fortunate in possessing 



250 SOME OF THE SACRED SPOTS 

this memorial. As the first church erected by the 
Pilo^rims would be t'he most sacred of our sites were it 
standing to-day, — as is the John-Street location to the 
Methodist Church, — even so and more is the Church 
of St. Martin's in the city of Canterbury. We turn 
away from the empty pomp of the empty cathedral to 
the little, old stone chapel that stands in its rear. On a 
grassy hillock, not unlike that on which the Epworth 
church stands, with a scenery somewhat hillier, yet 
similar to that which surrounds it, is the most ancient 
church in Britain, and, if we consider its style and aspect, 
perhaps the most ancient in Europe ; for though there are 
possibly churches in Rome that are of an earlier date, 
yet these were either erected by emperors, or have been 
so altered by Popes with pictures and images, that their 
original character, and especially their connection with 
early Christianity, is totally lost. This retains much of 
its primitive appearance unaltered. 

Its size is about fifty feet by twenty-five. It is built 
of stone and brick, some Roman, some British, laid to- 
gether in the rudest style. The door formerly opened 
in its side, but has been lately, and very unwisely, altered 
to the end. It was originally much shorter than it is 
now, but the present extension is of the days of Augus- 
tine and Bertha. There are seats for only about a hun- 
dred persons. At its entrance is a large and tall stone 
font, very rude of construction, in which was baptized 
Ethelbert, the first Christian king of Kent, and so of 
England. The monument of Bertha, his wife, and an 
earlier convert, is also shown. However dubious these 
memorials may be, it is certain that this was a Chris- 
tian temple in the time of Augustine, and probably be- 
fore. Bede declares that it was most probably built 
while the Romans possessed Britain. It is therefore 
conjectured that the first British Christians, of the sec- 
ond or third century, erected it, and that on the revival 



OF ENGLAND. 251 

of Christianity, under the labors of Augustine, it became 
the royal and metropolitan church. 

Nothing can be plainer than this edifice. No back- 
woods chapel is more rustic. One cannot pass through 
its modern but antique-looking gate and the venerable 
little graveyard, and enter the lowly portal, without 
bringing back the days when the little flock gathered 
there, and, free from the artificial formalities of modern 
Anglicism, or the deadly mummeries of Romanism, en- 
joyed the ministration of the Word in its original sim- 
plicity, freshness, and power. These hills looked quietly 
down upon them; the same fields of luscious greenness 
glimmered softly around them ; the same shaded and 
balmy sky bent over them. Within them glowed the 
same precious hopes, struggled the same fearful doubts, 
wrestled the same mighty forces, that have always marked 
the lives of the people of God, and will to the end of 
the world. 

I could but think of the service done to Christ and 
his Church by the stream at whose fountain-head I was 
standing. The glorious company of earliest martyrs, 
who fell before the rage of their pagan brethren ; the 
more modern heroes, Latimer, Ridley, Cranmer, Rogers, 
and hundreds of others who " loved not their lives unto 
the death " ; every Christian body in this and our land, 
fi'om the Establishment, its eldest-born, to Methodism, 
its youngest, sprang from this godly seed, as well as 
the great institutions of faith and love with which Eng- 
land and America are sowing the earth with heavenly 
pearl. 

Not the royal converts, but the humble believers, who 
here rejoiced in Christ, were the true nursing-fathers 
and mothers of this great flock of the Divine Shepherd. 
King and queen gave it earthly power ; the working 
Christian, heavenly. 

Our sacred spots properly terminate here. They be- 



252 SOME OF THE SACRED SPOTS 

gan with the cell of an itinerant; they end with the 
humblest of churches, in which such as he labored faith" 
fully in the Lord. The grand edifices into which these 
flowered may stand or faU without affecting the faith thus 
established. If that is ever of the simple, happy, and 
vigorous type of the worshippers at Lindisfarne, Melrose, 
Jarrow, Epworth, and St. Martin's, England may yet 
accomplish much for herself and the world. Great 
beams are yet in her eye, -^— beams of formalism, pride, 
caste, unbrotherliness toward her neighbors. If she be 
purged from these sins, she shall be more than ever 
a vessel of honor. May St. Martin's, not kings and 
cathedrals, be the model after which she shall be 
moulded ! Crowns and costly temples are not excluded 
from the service of God ; but it has been England's 
mistake, from the time of Ethelbert till now, that she 
sets too great store by the patronage of the one and the 
pomposity of the other. Could her Dissenters be united 
in the liberation of themselves from the thraldom of a 
political hierarchy, they would soon liberate the nation ; 
but the Wesleyans, as a body, do not desire this emanci- 
pation, and the Dissenters agitate it but feebly, and so 
the spiritual tyranny still holds its own. As a specie- 
men of this tyranny, see the Church of Epworth. With 
less than twenty communicants, and less than seventy in 
the congregation, it compels a poor and small population, 
who attend and sustain the chapels, to contribute over 
five thousand dollars a year to the support of a preacher 
they never hear nor see. So Canterbury tithes the 
wliole region round to feed the officials of a service 
which nobody attends. Fifty miles and more from it, 
near the Shakspeare Cliff, I was told by a countryman 
that much of the land thereabouts belonged to this See. 
An effort is being made to make these tithes voluntary. 
If they were so, many of these churches would instantly 
collapse. Let this power be taken from the Queen and 



OF ENGLAND. 



253 



this tax from the people, and Christianity would soon 
abolish England's formalism, and probably England's 
throne. Five times at each service is that throne re- 
membered ; not once the people ; and that in a book of 
Common Prayer. It must be reversed. The people 
are more than their governor. These walks among the 
earliest footsteps of the Church teach us this. May the 
first love be revived in more than its original purity and 
power on this long-consecrated soil ! 





XIV. 



LAST LOOK AT ENGLAt^D. 



FoiiKSTONE. Near midnight. 




Y first sketch of England was a photograph of 
first impressions. My last shall present the 
picture as it stands forth in my memory after a 
brief but quite intimate acquaintance. The surroundings 
of that writing-desk were a country inn and its beer- 
drinking loungers : that of this is a company of sleepers 
stretched upon the divans of the Folkstone station, their 
valises for their pillows, waiting for the tide to start them 
to France. As we shall have to wait two hours yet for 
Neptune to make his connections with our wharf, there 
will be ample time for the review proposed. If it shall 
seem particularly dull, attribute it to the weight of delib- 
eration rather than to that of drowsiness. The bird of 
wisdom utters his judgments at midnight, so does the 
British Parliament those of the nation ; so may I, being 
here, mine. Ere the review is begun, let me give you a 
sketch of this day's rainy wanderings to 



SHAKSPEARE S CLIFF. 



I started forth from this place betimes, welcomed with 
the ever-weeping countenance of mother England. The 
chalky hills which rose suddenly and steeply behind the 
town were slowly climbed j the everywhere present and 



LAST LOOK AT ENGLAND. 255 

everywhere blessed McAdam alone made even that slow- 
ness possible. A walk of six miles over dreary downs, 
empty of house or hut, almost of beast and bird and 
man, through most fitful, but when the fit was on, most 
furious rains, gave me the needed accompaniments. I 
thought how " poor Tom's-a-cold " was muttered sadly 
in this very region, and under more chilling blasts. The 
poor protection of a rubber coat hardly prevented my 
sympathy with Lear's exposures ; while with him I 
could exclaim, — 

" I tax not you^ ye elements, with unkindness." 

Only one man did I meet in that long walk. He was 
the peasant hireling I have referred to, of the Archbishop 
of Canterbury. 

At last a telegraph station appears on the right, not 
far above the valley into which the road was descending 
to the port of Dover. The old man tells me that is 
Shakspeare's Cliff. The ploughed and muddy steep is 
with difficulty surmounted. A little box, a shelter for 
the look-out, stands on the topmost point. In it I found 
a covert from the storm ; while from it, both below and 
beyond, I drank in the fulness of the scene. 

The cliff is worthy of its fame. It is not mountainous. 
Nor is 

" von tall anchoring bark 
Diminished to her cock." 

Neither are the " crows " half-way down " beetles " ; 
nor the " men " on the beach, " mice." 

In fact they are not diminished at all. But the poet 
must be excused, on the ground that he had never seen 
the spot, and so drew upon his imagination for the facts. 
Or if he had, he was untra veiled, and had no large unit 
of measure. Kit North's greater experience did not 
prevent his committing greater folly, as you will remem- 
ber. It is certainly sublime compared with anything 
between Stratford and London. 



256 LAST LOOK AT ENGLAND. 

Perhaps, after all, he needs no defence. In this, as ia 
most things, he is right. For he paints it not as the 
judgment of a broad-day beholder, but the impression to 
be made on one who had been led hither blind, and put 
on the edge of the beetling crag, while his attendanfei 
seeks to make the seeming height still higher, the better 
to carry out his design. To such extravagance does he 
go that he exclaims, when pretending to stand below, —■ 

"Look up a height; the shrill-gorged lark so far 
Cannot be seen or heard." 

It is not far from two hundred feet deep. Yet its pre- 
cipitousness increases its effect, and one can hardly hang 
long over it, — 

" Lest the brain turn, and the deficient sight 
Topple down headlong." 

The out-look is much the same as when Shakspeare, 
or Lear, or the real personages that before and since 
their widely separated day gazed upon it. 

A mile below nestles the little town of Dover, on the 
side of an arm of the sea, crowded between this cliff and 
the higher one that rises from the other side of the frith, 
on whose top stands the Castle, second only to the Tower 
in historical importance, and potent yet in its undecaying 
greatness. The chalk precipices wind along the shore, 
falling away where the town lies, but renewing their 
whiteness and smoothness under the hill of the Castle.' 
They seem to say, " England shows her high, white fore- 
head defiantly to all who insolently or covetously gaze at 
her from beyond the sea." 

Across this watery belt of blue and gray, changing in 
color with the changing sky, lie the dim shores of the 
far-stretching East. Rome, Greece, Jerusalem, Egypt 
are linked by solid earth, and more solid history, to that 
faint line. One forgets all about the poet and his imagi- 
nary character as the grander realities rise from the sea 



LAST LOOK AT ENGLAND. 257 

and shore and throng to his memory. Caesar with his 
legions is on that opposite coast, is tossed on these vainly 
resisting waves ; pirates and marauders follow, now 
called dukes and kings ; Angles, Saxons, Danes, and 
Normans, who, during the slow-moving centuries, came 
and saw this fair brow glittering in the morning sun ; 
and, as with all the other fair brows that passed before 
them, instantly coveted and attempted to win her. How 
often have these waters been covered with invading 
fleets ! How often has the blood of the conquerors 
mingled with that of their slaves, and national strength 
grown from seeming weakness, — glory from shame ! 
Especially do we see the robed and sandalled priests 
of the new religion stemming these opposing floods, that 
this people may receive a whiteness such as no cliff 
can suggest, — the purifications of heavenly grace. Au- 
gustine, Lactantius, perhaps Paul, have moved hither 
with precisely the feelings that Hall came to the Sandwich 
Isles or Judson to Burmah, — to rescue barbarians from 
abominable idolatries. 

But the Castle guns broke in upon my musings, and 
yet intensified them. Their roar was the fitting accom- 
paniment to the history that was marching before me. 
It rung through two thousand years, and made them all 
as one moment. Time was not. 

More modern and more useful inventions break the 
charm. Under my feet, in the heart of the hill, is heard 
the rumbling of the rail-car. The track to Folkstone is 
largely tunnelled through these cliffs. Caesar and William 
did not compass this triumph in their desires, nor Shak- 
speare in his imagination ; so we are yet ahead of all 
the great ones gone before, and I can leave my seat with 
that complacency that a sense of superiority ever im- 
parts. 

By carefully stepping down slippery stairs of chalk, you 
can reach the bottom. Looking up, the hill towers ma- 
17 



258 LAST LOOK AT ENGLAND. 

jestically. At your feet the waves leap upon and crawl 
around boulders of chalk of every size and shade. The 
size of a piece of chalk would be a harder problem in 
situ than where it is ordinarily propounded. Many of 
the lesser rocks are covered with beautiful green mosses, 
as carefully combed out as if planted in a marine her- 
barium. Their white faces and green hair remind one 
of the mermaids, or of that fisherman's daughter whom 
Dr. Holmes so pathetically describes, — 

" Her hair hung round her pallid cheeks 
Like seaweed round a clam." 

But the moans of the sea swallow up all gayer fancies, 
and the too familiar lines roll and dash upon the inner 
and unseen shores of the soul. 

" Break, break, break, 
On thy cold gray rocks, O sea ! 
But the tender grace of a day that is dead, 
"Will never come back to me ! " 

The day will come back to all who sorrow not with- 
out hope, more tender, more lovely, without a night and 
without end. 

" Break from thy throne, illustrious mom ! " 

How sublimely the faith of the Gospel exalts itself 
above these moaning, beating waves of sorrow and time. 
They may howl with anguish : they may leap upon its 
base, and throw their cold spray far up its lofty sides, 
but they neither shake its foundations, nor bedew its 
summits. 

THE PEOPLE. 

But we must turn our eyes away from the visions and 
dreams of Dover. The Charon boat that is to ferry us 
over the sickening Styx to the Elysian fields beyond will 
soon be summoning us to the doleful passage, and our 
last look at England will be exchanged for a first look 
over the gunwale at the tumultuous waves of the Chan- 



LAST LOOK AT ENGLAND. 259 

nel. As a country, England confirms all my first im- 
pressions ; in fact, were it not for the incessant rain and 
cloud it would be perfect. But those rains and clouds 
give her this perfection. Dry up her sky, and you dry 
up her soil. Still it has a uniformity that tires the eye. 
From the edge of the Scotch Lakes to the Isle of Wight 
it is as much of one look as central New York. The 
Highlands, Westmoreland, and Wales break it up as the 
Adirondacks do New York on the north, and the AUe- 
ghanies on the south ; but the parts most travelled, most 
populous, and most historical are low rolling fields, never 
abrupt, rarely lofty. The scenery has a tender, effem- 
inate beauty, which makes you wonder where the hardy, 
strong, coarse blood of the nation comes fi'om. The land 
ought to produce beauties, or delicately-natured men. It 
certainly does not raise these as a class. The peasantry 
of England are not fascinating in appearance ; and the 
rare bloods whom I saw in Parliament are far from hand- 
some or polished, in looks or address. Our people, as a 
people, are superior in beauty and grace to those of 
England. Its attractions of feature are largely confined 
to the land. 

There are two reasons for these defects ; her climate 
and her institutions. Her climate drives everybody in- 
doors. Windows are rarely open in their pleasant June 
days. Nobody sits on the verandahs or in the doorways. 
This sedusion is confined to her upper classes. The 
poor are one in feeling as in condition. On balmy, if not 
bright mornings, I expected to see the windows up and 
life bustling around and outside of the house ; but every- 
thing was as close shut and drawn as if death were 
within. It is so at all hours of the day, and all days of 
the year. You must get inside of the house to see Eng- 
land. Home means something there, as it does in all 
countries with long winters. It is not that they are 
more aflTectionate than other people ; but their climate is 



260 LAST LOOK AT ENGLAND. 

less affectionate than other climes, and hence they are 

habitually 

" shut in 
By the tumultous privacy of storm." 

Such a life, if it be religious, intelligent, and pecuniarily 
comfortable, is among the highest of human livings. 
The tenderest and purest attributes of our nature grow 
best in that soil. Hence, if you have the entree to some 
of these homes, you will find many of the loveliest plants 
there, as rarest flowers bloom in hot-house gardens; 
though it is as difficult to get in as into hot-house gar- 
dens. One must, however, have money, piety, and intel- 
ligence to make this life a happy one. If he lacks them 
9-11, as many of the people do, he is miserable indeed 
in this miserable climate, and takes to strong drinks and 
fierce pleasures to cast off the heavy atmosphere. 

Those of the upper classes, who have intelligence, 
but not religion, are equally gross in their tastes. The 
national sport, of which they boast so much, is run- 
ning horses. In all England races abound. It is a 
brutal practice. From the horse lashed to the top of a 
gallop to the least spectator, all are degraded below their 
real nature. Gambling, drinking, and fighting are the 
essential features of the day. And this is her petted 
institution. The Queen gives prizes, and the nobility 
throng to the scenes. Many ladies of high degree, even 
to countesses, duchesses, and princesses, share the excite- 
ment ; and yet it is hardly more refined than a Spanish 
bull-fight. For this passion, the climate is somewhat to 
blame. Pressed under its heavy weight, and lacking 
moral power to resist its influence, they are driven to 
these gross incitements. 

But this is not the only nor the greatest cause. Caste 
completes the degradation which climate induces. The 
people have no inward atmosphere, clear and bracing, to 
lift off the load of clouds without. The social and civil 



LAST LOOK AT ENGLAND. 261 

skies are far heavier than the natural ones. Had New 
England none of this uplift of spirit, her east winds 
might drive her into like manner of life ; they are as 
bad, though not as prolonged, as any English atmos- 
pheric miseries. But her whole social and civil life is so 
free from east wind ; so bright and balmy and liberal is 
this air, that she can easily endure the outward infirmi- 
ties. But no one can conceive, who has not seen it, the 
state of the masses of England. The social oppression 
is enormous. I found it the same everywhere. They 
are as much shut out from real communion with the 
middle and upper classes as if they were in another 
world. The ogcupants of Wordsworth's first cottage, at 
Grasmere, are well-to-do farmers, and far above the 
lowest class. Yet they told me how their brother, a 
painter in Ohio, writes to them that he had at last found 
a place where he did not have to take off his hat to 
everybody who carried a title ; and they spoke freely of 
the immeasurable distance between a lady and a lady's- 
maid, which service their sister held in a neighboring 
family. When I told them that our housemaids, sewing- 
girls and factory girls, mechanics, and farmers who tilled 
their fields with their own hands, were as good as any- 
body in America, and took off their hats to no superiors, 
they could not see how such a state of things could be. 
Fine-looking men would speak of those who hired them 
as "Master," in a tone precisely like that which the 
slaves of the South used to have. These are adopting 
the tones of the rest of us now ; those will. 

The social degradation is intensified by the civil. 
There are but about half a million of voters in a pop- 
ulation of thirty millions. In the discussions upon suf- 
frage, it has been said by the enemies of its extension, 
that to base it upon a six-pound rental would exclude 
nine tenths of the people as deserving as the fraction 
that would then be admitted. 



262 LAST LOOK AT ENGLAND. 

They are shut out from land as well as suffrage, and 
see only the great gentry owning these acres. To-day 
these gentry are especially covetous of land. More than 
gold, or even titles, do they seek to " lay field to field, that 
they may be placed alone in the midst of the earth." 

This grasping will soon be a gasping aristocracy. 
Results are rapidly ripening for it. Education is going 
forward. I heard a debate on this subject in the House 
of Lords, in which several bishops joined, and all ac- 
knowledged the difficulty of confining this work to the 
Church schools, and the eagerness of the people for edu- 
cation. The Bishop of Lincoln said he heard Prince 
Albert say that no people had improved^o much in this 
matter in the last twenty years as the British ; and still 
everything almost remains to be done, judging from the 
height of our perfection. 

Temperance is making steady advances among the 
people. I met with gentlemen of wealth and position 
at Ambleside, Kendall, and Epworth, who were active in 
the cause. Excellent temperance inns may be found in 
every considerable town. From Edinburg to South- 
ampton I made them my homes, and found them very 
homelike. In that respect she is far ahead of us. Our 
temperance people ought to devote their energies to the 
establishment of this class of houses. It would do much 
towards the ultimate success of their cause. I attended 
a large meeting at Exeter Hall, in favor of a bill giving 
parishes the right to pass local prohibitory laws. It was 
enthusiastic, and betokened victory. That building itself 
is a queer example of the mixed condition of all things 
human. It is both a tavern and a temple. Rum flows, 
a fiery river of death, around the river of life. The 
wheat and the tares grow together. Probably they are 
owned in this case by the same farmer, who finds each 
crop profitable. 

Politics are feeling the struggles of this new life. 



LAST LOOK AT ENGLAND. 263 

Said a salesman of Longman, Brown, & Longman's to 
me, " We were all getting to be democrats a short time 
ago, and believed, with John Bright, that royalty did n't 
pay. But we are all converted from that now." I told 
him they would be bigger democrats than ever within 
five years. 

The Queen sees this, and, wise woman as she is, is 
seeking to cultivate the friendship of the people. She 
sends her son to America, and made him and her other 
children visit the Exhibition on the shilling-days. And 
the flunkey Times confesses that the people treat the 
royal children less rudely than the moneyocracy of the 
five-shilling days. She may be gathered to her fathers 
before the storm breaks. It may not come as a storm, 
but in the still small voice, though this is not the usual 
way for such power to die. 

It was their fear of this that made the aristocracy so 
anxious for our disruption. Brougham, Shaftesbury, all 
the blue-blooded abolitionists, were busily engaged from 
the beginning in taking back all they had said against 
the slaveholders. 

The trouble was, that things were getting so delicate 
that to speak for America was almost to speak against 
their whole system of government ; and one said to me 
of the Rev. William Arthur, an eloquent defender of 
our cause, " We think he is almost too much of an 
American for an Englishman." 

One has but little idea how closely the crown is woven 
to the head of the State through the Church. They 
cannot even administer the Sacrament without remem- 
bering the Queen. The nobility and gentry are prayed 
for, while the only allusion to the people is a prayer 
for contentment in that condition of life into which we 
are born. That may have originally been intended to 
suppress the ambition of the nobles, its sole force now 
is to keep the poor quiet in their poverty. Many have 



264 LAST LOOK AT ENGLAND. 

broken loose from an aristocratic Church, and lifted up 
their voice against it. They must likewise against an 
aristocratic State. 

1 look forward to the hour when an Imperial Parlia-" 
ment shall sit in London with senators and representa- 
tives from her colonies, then States, of North America, 
Australia, India, Polynesia. Had she granted our fathers 
the representation they demanded, that end wpuld have 
long since appeared in view. She preferred to abandon 
the taxation of her colonies, rather than to abolish her 
insular institutions and inaugurate a World Republic. 
Let her even now equalize her people, and it would 
soon be. A World Congress would follow a World 
Exhibition. Britain copying America may outstrip her 
in the glorious race. If she delays too long, Washing- 
ton, and not London, will be the capital of the Univer- 
sal Union. 

But I am getting political and prophetic ; let me sub- 
side into commoner themes. My last views shall be of 
the homelike and every-day sort. 

England and America, speaking the same language, 
as they do, seem at first sight to be more alike than any 
other peoples. The English, probably, will not like to 
acknowledge this, nor the Americans either, just now. 
For the former prefer to resemble the haughty, old con- 
tinentals rather than the raw, young Jonathan; and the 
latter are somewhat justly sore at their treatment by 
their mother in their hour of agony. Yet one cannot 
always be as he wishes, and we have to be compared 
with each other whether we will or no. Some of the 
minor differences are worth noting. First, as to speak- 
ing. She, of course, complains that we talk through our 
nose. I told one gentleman who spoke of that peculiarity 
as something very degrading, that we perhaps had better 
authority for it than they had for their abdominal elocu- 
tion. For the Bible says when God created man he 



LAST LOOK AT ENGLAND, 265 

breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and he became 
a living soul. If his living soul went into his body 
through his nose, it was proper for it to come out that 
way rather than from the depth of the stomach. It 
showed the Americans to be the more akin to primeval 
Adam. 

But the real difference is not so much in the organs 
through which we speak as the pitch of the voice. Ours 
is in a higher key than theirs. Though one notices in 
foreign dialects and foreign languages that they are all 
uttered in a higher key than he supposed we spoke. 
They run up at the end of the sentence generally. The 
educated classes are scarcely distinguishable from Ameri- 
cans. This was especially noticeable in the speakers in 
Parliament, and in Spurgeon, Trench, Arthur, Gumming, 
their best preachers. But the dialects of the lower 
classes are almost untranslatable. I was nearly as 
much bothered at Grasmere and Epworth to under- 
stand the conversation of the peasants as if they had 
talked in a foreign tongue. 

Some words in use with us they never hear : " depot," 
" freight-train," " car," " store," are never used. " Sta- 
tion," " goods-train," " carriage," " shop," are their sev- 
eral substitutes. " Clerk " is never applied to a sales- 
man, — " dark " they always call it, and apply it only to 
a writer and a Church officer. " Either " and " neither " 
I found were perplexing them as much as us. Prominent 
speakers pronounce them differently. So they are also 
in transitu, Oxford and Cambridge are quarrelling over 
the word knowledge. Oxford says it is mediaeval and 
orthodox to say knowledge ; Cambridge approves of the 
modern and universal knol'edge. I heard the Bishop 
of Lincoln pronounce it after the Oxford fashion. 

English travellers complain of our railroads as com- 
pared with their dustless roads. That is all their ad- 
vantage, and that owing to the constant rain. Their 



266 LAST LOOK AT ENGLAND. 

carriages are comfortless affairs, except the first-class; 
and all are cold in winter, without fire or water or 
refreshments, or any means of relief for the sick. As 
a whole, they will not compare with those in America, 
except for safety. Being locked in, you can hardly fall 
out. But Miiller has taken away that argument. Better 
fall out through open doors than be flung out, murdered, 
through open windows. The third-class is getting to be 
quite commonly used by very respectable people. Try- 
ing them all, as I have, I should prefer that class usu- 
ally to the second. The first are a foolish expense. 
The second are near the first in price, and the last in 
character. I have seen clergymen, merchants, and many 
fine-looking people in the parliamentary or penny-a-mile 
trains. The corporations will not run them but once 
a day, which is all government requires of them, or they 
would soon drive the second off the track. They make 
them as disagreeable as possible, though some roads near 
great centres are more courteous. The class system of 
society alone prevents the introduction of the American 
car. 

Mr. TroUope thought American ladies very ungrateful 
for the seats they have offered them, and even heard 
some New York gentlemen talk of getting up a demon- 
stration on the subject. But in England I have seen 
like forgetfulness in the few cases where they had such 
favors extended to them. It may be that the unexpect- 
edness of the courtesy finds them unprepared, for they 
are seldom favored with such offers. At church, more 
than once, among all sects, I have seen pews half filled 
through all the service, and ladies and gentlemen stand- 
ing in the aisles. Some churches act like Americans, 
gentlemen, and Christians. Dr. Cumming's and Mr. 
Spurgeon's are particularly obliging. But it is not the 
rule of society. 

One very excellent custom prevails here, — that of 



LAST LOOK AT ENGLAND. 267 

putting texts of Scripture over their public fountains. I 
thought often of her superiority over us in this respect. 
Every London fountain has as its motto such fit words 
as these : " If any man thirst, let hira come unto Me 
and drink." We are too afraid to be Christian. No 
statue of a minister is in the chapel of Mount Auburn ; 
none at Greenwood. Jonathan Edwards should stand 
by the side of John Winthrop ; John Summerfield with 
DeWitt Clinton. We need reform in this respect, and 
this outward recognition of Christianity ought to be 
reestablished. 

Finally, let me commend the common people for their 
kindness and honesty. Norton's Hand-book says they 
are not trustworthy. But he is greatly mistaken. I 
never met persons more anxious to please. Ask your 
way, and they will go far out of theirs to show it to you, 
and be profuse in their description. I asked a stranger 
a direction in Edinburgh, and he walked several blocks to 
guide me. I protested against it, but he said that it was 
but little that we could do to show our love for our fel- 
low-men, and that we must do that little to show our 
love for Christ. Such language a stranger would hardly 
hear from a gentleman of New York on asljing the way. 
But I heard it in some shape frequently. I never was 
answered curtly. Some judge of England by London 
cabmen. But they are no better and no worse than those 
of any large town. The people are exceedingly honest. 
" Honor bright," " 'pon my word," mean much with an 
Englishman. I trusted my valise to a porter, whoni I 
saw at the depot at Carlisle, to send it to London, with 
nothing but his name for my protection, and I found it 
there on my arrival. I should have hardly dared to have 
placed like confidence in an American porter. 

These are the saving qualities of the nation. Out of 
them has her growth been great. Out of them it will 
be greater. The people of England are able to take 



268 LAST LOOK AT ENGLAND. 

care of their liberties. It is nonseuse and sin that de- 
clares they would be riotous if free. There ought to 
be instantly universal suffrage. Temperance, education, 
and religion would grow faster than ever before if they 
were thus made the real seat of power. But I must 
stop. The memory of many pleasant walks and talks in 
these country regions will be a joy forever. 

If any seeming harshness shall have imparted its bitter 
flavor to these pages, it has come from sympathy with 
the people and abhorrence of the evils, social and civil, 
that still oppress them. It is hard, I know, for a nation, 
as it is for an individual, to change their habits. Ours 
has shown that only a terrible war can uproot a wrong 
which every conscience has always recognized in its 
fulness of iniquity; and we do not hasten forward to 
perfection with the speed that God requires. These in- 
stitutions are equally rooted, and, despite the evident and 
unutterable misery they inflict on the beggared millions, 
seem equally ineradicable. But they too must disappear. 
" Every plant that my Heavenly Father hath not planted, 
shall be rooted up." Whether social, civil, or religious, 
whether based on caste or color, however fortified with 
age, and power, and wealth, and " the fear of change," they 
shall flee away ; and human brotherhood in Christ possess 
all nations. To this favor will this early and renowned 
home of religion and law assuredly come. The leaven 
is working. Let our cause succeed, and she will speedily 
follow. A democratic republic shall gladden her shores, 
kindred with our own and with all the world's. To the 
land of my fathers I give heartily my midnight benedic- 
tion. God bless the Commonwealth of Great Britain ! 



BOOK SECOND. 



FRANCE. 



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BOOK II. 

FRANCE. 



XV. 

ENTRfiE. 




^F England wears a foreign look, France gives 
forth a foreign sound. One is alien to the 
eyes, the other to the ears also. I have told 
how I shivered in the rain on the Shakspeare Cliff, and saw 
France through rolling clouds and waves. The roll was 
transferred to me before morning, and I was tumbled topsy- 
turvy, inside and out, before my weak feet or head (I 
am not sure which) touched the solid and the sunny 
land. If the salutation was with the head, it was as 
pardonable an act of idolatry as Naaman's in the house 
of Rimmon. The goddess Terra never seems so adora- 
ble as after being subjected to the tortures which her 
angry brother of the sea inflicts upon his votaries. 

BOULOGNE-SUR-MEE. 

At sundawn we ran up a narrow inlet, — green, shelv- 
ing shores on the one hand, and close, high, staring, 
white stone houses on the other, — and fastened our boat 
to the sleepy dock of Boulogne-sur-mer. A string of 
women hastened to greet us, little and lithe, of middle 
age, with black bloomer dresses, gray hose, and white 



272 ENTRJ^E. 

caps. What Is their mission ? Were they the repre- 
sentatives of this most polite people, who thus fittingly 
send forth their ladies as their heralds, to welcome us, 
ruder races, to their graceful shores ? The mystery is 
soon solved. The black-kirtled dames caught up the 
huge trunks and boxes, swung them upon racks that 
hung round their necks and down their shoulders, and 
hurried off to the custom-house. So this most highly 
finished nation sets its women its heaviest tasks. Poor 
creatures, I pitied them, though they were probably un- 
conscious of any need of pity. I had seen women in 
England working in the fields for a ha'penny an hour. 
I had seen women in Maryland toiling in like manner 
for nothing an hour ; but their work looked lighter than 
this, — their wages were too : for these earned more in 
this one hour than their sisters in British serfdom did in 
a day, and than those did in America in a year. The 
last have since escaped that condition. When will the 
first ? They have a strap around the neck, to which a 
bit of board or a basket is attached, on which the trunk 
rests : the heaviest are carried on a litter, three or four 
at once, by two of the portresses. A sixpence satisfies 
the custom-house official, an equal sum the snug little 
grandmother, and we are off for Paris. 

There were but few passengers by boat or rail, the 
travel between the two cities being but trifling, when 
compared with that between ours of like neighborhood. 
London and Paris are but few miles farther apart than 
Boston and New York, and about the same number of 
routes connect them, most of them running day and night 
trains. The fare too is the same, — one pound giving you 
a good second-class through ticket. And yet upon each of 
the two routes on which I crossed and recrossed the Chan- 
nel, there were not a score of travellers, and apparently not 
a hundred pounds of freight ; and this between the two 
largest cities in the world, each draining an immensely 



ENTREE. 273 

populous country. No wonder their steamers are such 
miserable tubs. How different from the crowded boats 
and trains that join our cities. Nationality is the cause 
of our superiority. One speech, one interest, one flag, 
make us flow together. Here the natives feel that 
greater gulfs than the Channel separate them. Poverty, 
language, and nationalities roll wide and deep between 
these neighbors, not twenty miles apart. The breadth 
of Long Island Sound makes broad distinctions, which 
the scholars on either side elucidate in philosophical dis- 
course as to the effect of climate, soil, origin, et cetera, 
on developing varieties of mankind. Give them one 
language, one flag, and especially universal liberty, and 
the savans would soon find these so-called natural differ- 
ences disappearing in the grand unification. 

Boulogne by the sea has history, if we could stop to 
read it. Here Godfrey started for Jerusalem, and 
changed his coronet for the crown of that city, and a grave 
beside the stormy Channel for one in the more stormy 
metropolis of Saintdom. Charles Lamb requested Pat- 
more to inquire if " old Godfrey is living, and how he 
got home from the Crusades," adding, with his inimitable 
quaintness, " He must be a very old man now." Suppos- 
ing his friend had exhausted that topic of inquiry, I did 
not see fit to pursue it. Here, too, Napoleon on the Arc 
de Triomphe de la place du Carrousal, pompously says, he 
" threatened England." " L' Armee Franfaise, embarquee 
a Boulogne, mena9ait FAngleterre." All the rest of 
the inscription describes victories at Austerlitz, in Italy, 
throughout the Continent. It was equal to them all to 
** threaten England." 

Here, too, pleasantest thought of all, Thackeray had 
loitered, and as if in remembrance of his early poverty, 
makes Claude Newcombe wear away his hungry days 
along this hungry beach. But the ghosts of Godfrey, 
Napoleon, and Thackeray must not beguile us from the 
18 



274 ENTREE. 

more alluring sights beyond. I take my seat beside 
long-robed priests, dapper women with the gayest, clean- 
est, and tastiest of caps, and men in broadcloth and blouse. 
Blouse and cap are the universal costume of man and 
woman. The first, a short, blue, clean, cotton frock ; the 
last, white and ruffled, and jauntily set on the head. 
Never have I seen one dirty, soiled, or tasteless. They 
are the only clean people in Europe ; and yet some of 
their public habits surpass those of all other nations in 
disgustfulness. 

How bright the town and the landscape look beside 
the ever-cloudy and rainy Britain. These white walls 
and white blinds contrast with the shining green of grass 
and trees like America. Were it not for the stiffness of 
village streets, and the hut-like character of the thatched 
hamlet, one could easily fancy himself in his far-off 
home. 

A few hours' ride through a tame' country lands us at 
Paris. 

HOTEL ACCLIMATION. 

My first experience was amusing, perplexing, and 
may be to some reader instructive. I stood by the 
cars, inwardly debating what course to pursue, when I 
found my valise whisked from under my eye in the most 
urbane but rapid style of Parisian politeness and Amer- 
ican fleetness. I rallied and secured it. Again they 
press their flattering attentions. I drop the word " hotel," 
forgetting that that is a French word. Instantly the 
valise is resnatched, tossed upon a cab, and I very po- 
litely requested to enter. Believing in free agency, I 
resented this interference, and ordered it back again, 
suggesting that I would go to one near at hand. As 
instantly is it caught up and carried, I helplessly follow- 
ing after, across the open square, through several by- 
streets, and into a far from attractive court. The landlady 



ENTHtE. 275 

jabbers smilingly ; a porter flies down the stairs, seizes 
the poor helpless portmanteau, and begins to reclimb 
them, beckoning me to follow. Had not my resolution 
revived at this moment, I should have probably been 
comfortably tucked into bed within fifteen minutes. I 
found I must assert my sovereign rights. I ordered 
the captor to halt and surrender his prey. On my flight 
hither, I had seen " Thompson's Prince of Wales Hotel," 
on the block facing the depot. It sounded homelike, 
especially the " Thompson." I bethought me of this 
way of escape, gave my energetic guide his fee, resumed 
my valise, and left. They looked queerly, as they were 
thus compelled to welcome the coming and speed the 
parting guest at the same moment. I returned hither, 
preferring, if fleeced, to be so in my mother tongue. I 
could then understand, if not enjoy, the operation. I 
found pleasant quarters till the next day, when, guided 
by a friend, I was transferred to private lodgings, — the 
pleasantest and cheapest style if you would make a stay 
of a month or so. 

This first experience of roughing it in Paris taught 
me two lessons : first, be not carried away with the con- 
fusion of tongues or the determination of porters ; second, 
have a place selected beforehand where to go and go 
there. Take your time then to look about you, and 
prepare at your ease to live the life of Paris. How 
cozy this room where I write the story of my entree into 
France and its capital. See how the pretty French 
taste peeps out everywhere in this seven by nine snug- 
gery; lace and damask curtains with heavy tassels hang 
before the doorlike window. A neat balustrade without 
gives a sight of the street below, and the privilege of 
jumping into it, if possessed with a perfect Parisian 
passion. A large gilded mirror, marble fireplace, mar- 
ble topped toilet-table, Brussels carpet, partly covering a 
polished oaken floor, two mahogany, damask-stuffed chairs ; 



276 ENTREE. 

such are the adomings of this humble tenement, for 
which the, I fear, not humble tenant pays the enormous 
sum of fifty francs a month, or thirty cents a day. 
Where will you find the like out of Paris ? And yet 
it could easily be found everywhere, were we so willed. 
American ladies could give their poorest chambers these 
comely adornings, had they but the wit and the will. 
These are not costly luxuries. This lace is not Brussels, 
nor the damask velvet. It is taste, not expense, that 
reigns here. Taste and cleanliness are the two French 
virtues ; they should be ours. The last we have ; in the 
first, being still English, we are defective. Paris should 
rule the boudoir as she does the bonnet ; the chamber, as 
well as the costume. She will yet : for taste, which is 
beauty, is certain to win the prize everywhere in the end. 

LINGUAL ACCLIMATIOIC. 

The acclimation of the tongue and ear is far slower 
than that of the rest of the body. I was at home in 
lodgings and in the streets long before I had become at 
ease in the language. Several marvels that I had read 
of I now experienced. One, that wise discovery of John 
Bull, who gravely remarked, looking on the crowds here, 
that he never saw so many foreigners before in all his 
life. Another, the equally profound remark of an equally 
profound Englishman, as recorded by Hood : " Why, 
even the little children in Paris talk French ! " How 
much one would give, as he stands here in absurd per- 
plexity, if he could again become a little child. When 
I see them playing in these parks, and crying out to each 
other in the intensity of .childish tones, I take off my 
hat, not only to their superior education, but to that 
kindly law of Nature, which makes us learn a language 
without knowing it, and so without weariness or vexation 
of spirit. I have to become as a little child, however 



ENTRtlE. ^Tt 

humiliating it may be, as many a proud spirit has to do 
in greater matters, if I wish for the treasures that lie all 
around me, and yet cannot otherwise be touched. 

Learning a foreign language at its home, is very dif- 
ferent from learning it -at school, or from books. I 
thought I knew French " like a book." And so I did, 
just like a book. It was all eye and no ear, and the 
same word does not look as it sounds. When, therefore, 
they rattle away words I know as well as I do my own 
name, I am as ignorant of them as I would be of that 
name if it was put before me in Chinese characters. 
So we tave to learn it like a little child, that is, by 
the ear. 

Then again, we imitate the child in that we learn the 
words in frequent use, common nouns and verbs first, 
the words connected with our daily bread. I would give 
more to talk with a gargon at a restaurant than a pro- 
fessor in his lecture-room. The boy, for so all these 
men-servants are called, though old enough to be your 
grandfather, has what I must have or starve. The learned 
professor I can talk with through his books. The moral 
of all this, Hood has put it into verse : — 

" Before you go to France, 
Be sure you know the lingo." _ 

The three best requisites for European travel are 
French, German, and Italian. Yet you can get along 
without any of them. It is astonishing how few words 
are necessary to satisfy our daily wants. And those few 
are soon learnt. For the rest, take your hands and 
gesture your way along. The chief loss is not to the 
eye, but that of insight into the style and manner of 
the minds of the people. I found my colloquies with 
the people of England among my best teachers. From 
these I am shut out. I would like to go inside of these 
bright and sprightly faces, — 



278 ENTREE. 

" To view with eye serene 
The very pulse of the machine." 

But that is forbidden. No Ullet de permission from 
an officer of state can give me that entree. So as to 
how the French people feel, and think on politics, Na- 
poleon, war, work, religion, America, I can give no 
information. I may get the door unlocked and partially- 
open, but not enough to give me or you much satis- 
faction. 

Shall we confine ourselves to the eye department, as 
the ear and tongue are locked so close ? Here is. enough 
for a score of sketches. My guide-book contains over 
six hundred pages, and if I write all that but, as you 
expect tourists to do, as their own, and then add what 
really are my own tedious reflections, you see where you 
would be. Not in the Paris you had fancied, pleasant, 
bustling, beautiful, driving dull care away ; but in a Paris 
as dismal, if not as dreadful, as that which existed here 
in revolutionary times. 

To save you from that fate, I must elect a portion of 
what my eyes see and thoughts think, and set it before 
you. If it is small, Parisian dishes at some fine restau- 
rants are apt to be ; if of questionable taste, so are they ; 
if oUa podrida, so are they ; if warmed up from memories, 
so are many of them. You can be assured, therefore, 
that in eating the dish thus set before you you are enjoy- 
ing, or rather experiencing, a truly Parisian sensation. 





XVI. 

PARIS: 



? 



FROM THE ARC DE TRIOMPHE. 

OST persons desire to get a general idea of a 
city before they do a special. A high point 
of observation alone can give this knowledge. 
Three or four of these are at your disposal. The towers 
of Notre Dame are the most historically central ; the 
Napoleon Column of the Place Vendome is the popula- 
tion centre ; the lantern of the Pantheon is the loftiest ; 
that of the Column of Liberty gives the sweep of the 
Boulevards ; but that of the Arc de Triomphe is the 
most artistic and all-embracing. On each of these heights 
I stood after sore climbing, but with rich rewards. Let 
us ascend the last. Leaving our cheerfiil chamber in 
the Rue de I'Oratoire, a few steps conduct us to the 
Champs Elysees. Turn your eyes to the right, and just 
before you appears the greatest monument of power and 
pride the earth sustains, — it may be confidently said, 
ever sustained. Sepulchres, temples, palaces, she has 
upheld ; but never an Arch of Victory equal to this. 
The Column of Trajan, the arches of Titus and Severus, 
are small and cheap beside this memento, professedly of 
the " grand army," but really of the grander Napoleon. 
I never felt before the eternity there is in stone. What- 
ever decay may cover the great captain's name, it wiU 
live fresh and immortal in these stones he has set up. 
Headstones will they ever be to mark his fame. 



280 PARIS. 

Draw near to it. Measurements can give you no 
idea of it. Of what use is it to say, " Conceive of a mass 
of stone one hundred and fifty-two feet high, one hundred 
and thirty-seven feet wide, and sixty-eight feet thick. 
Through its width is a carriage-way forty-five feet wide 
and ninety feet high. Through the narrower thickness 
is a transverse carriage-way twenty-five feet wide and 
fifty-seven feet high " ? All this I learned from my 
guide-book. It did not teach me much, and probably 
will not you. Let us try some corresponding measure- 
ments with which you are familiar. You are looking upon 
a pile, larger than our largest churches, that is covered 
thick with most vigorous bas-reliefs of peace and war. 
It is as wide as the central front of the National Capitol, 
or the Boston State House, or New York City Hall ; and 
as high as three fourths the height of Trinity steeple. 
That State House in site and size may well represent it. 
If it were built level with the street, and a carriage-drive 
should pass through an arch whose height should be the 
ceiling of its Hall of Representatives, that arch would not 
far from resemble this. Its position is equally superb ; 
its adomings are far superior; its object — there the 
comparison fails. The plain brick front, the representa- 
tive codfish, the homely statue of Webster, made hand- 
some by its homelier neighbor, — all these are forgotten ; 
and a building that represents the liberty, equality, and 
sovereignty of the people is immeasurably above the most 
splendid memorial of fruitless valor, personal aggrandize- 
ment, and national bondage. 

Radiating from this arch are twelve avenues, wide, 
straight, long, and lined with trees. They have all, 
with one or two exceptions, been opened by the present 
emperor. I said twelve. That is not quite true. There 
are to be that number ; but two are not yet opened ; 
and that side of the otherwise handsome circle shows 
what nearly the whole was when he began the enterprise. 



PARIS. 281 

Its dirty, drop-down shops will soon fall, if Napoleon 
does not tumble first. The greatness of this work may 
be imagined by supposing twelve broad avenues cut from 
the New York Park in as many directions, levelling the 
dense costly stores west of Broadway as remorselessly as 
the Five Points' dens on the east, some of them stretching 
out for miles, not over thinly peopled space, but through 
compact populations. 

Some idea of the power of the Emperor may be gained 
from this fact. Other demolitions and reconstructions 
are going on everywhere, but none equal to this. Two 
of the streets attract your chief attention. The Avenue 
de ITmpera trice, that of the Empress, runs out of the 
city to the Bois de Boulogne, the park of Paris. It is 
three hundred feet wide, straight as an arrow, and hard 
as marble. It has seven divisions ; the central is for 
carriages, that on the right for horsemen, that to the left 
for footmen, each flanked by enclosed spaces of grass and 
trees, and these again flanked by carriage and footways. 
Elegant houses front the whole. The woods it leads to 
I wandered in for many delightful hours ; through long, 
heavily shaded avenues, around parks with browsing deer 
and sheep, by the side of romantic lakes, through gorges 
and under waterfalls, — lake, gorge, and cataract made 
out of level earth and Seine water; in the garden of 
acclimation, where flourish rare plants and foreign domes- 
ticated animals, strange, though familiar ; often resting, 
chiefly under the awnings and boughs that surrounded a 
Swiss chalet, where delicious milk was served by brown- 
skinned beauties. Of all the haunts of Paris for comfort 
and delight, give me that Swiss chalet of the Bois de 
Boulogne. 

But this scene is a long way from the Paris we 
mounted hither to see. That lies on the opposite side of 
the Arc. Turn round, and the second and superior of 
the main avenues lies beneath you. Starting out from 



282 PARIS. 

under your feet is the Champs Elysees. It is straight, 
as is everything perfected in France, wide, lined with 
many rows of trees, and thronged with carriages antd 
pedestrians : a mile and a half of the stream of human 
life flows through these green banks of foliage. Its 
lower mile, for an equal breadth, spreads out into a 
green sea of trees and gardens, isletted with palaces and 
haunts of pleasure, sometimes of dissipation, but care- 
fully conceited under the array of propriety and taste. 
Nothing shocks the eye or the conscience, though nothing 
leads or points to heaven. 

At the farther end of this avenue you see a square 
with fountains and statues. A grim Egyptian obelisk 
in its centre is looking as much out of place in this mod- 
ern flutter as a mummy in his case at a ball. This is 
Place of the Guillotine, which all the while ran blood 
in those days when God avenged the slaughter of St. 
Bartholomew upon the descendants of those murderers. 
Beyond this appears a deep grove of tall trees, behind 
which rise the gray towers of the Tuileries, — a long, 
tall, French-roofed, massy, but not majestic pile. There 
is no Windsor grandeur about a French palace, any more 
than there is British pride in French blood. 

The Tuileries join the Louvre, a quadrangle that 
stretches half a mile farther into the city. Beyond this, 
the eye wanders distracted over gray roofs, gray walls, 
gray streets, everything gray but skies and man. They 
wear no aspect of decay. The buff fagade of the newer 
and nearer dwellings slightly modifies the prevailing tint 
of age. The towers of Notre Dame lift their square 
front to the right of the Louvre. The dome of the 
Hotel des Invalides, under which Napoleon sleeps in 
gaudy splendor, is just across the Seine, to your right. 
The Pantheon rears its lofty dome at the farther end of 
the city, towering high over the Sorbonne, Jardin des 
Plantes, and other intellectual centres of the Latin quar- 



PARIS. 283 

ter. That church, built by a courtesan, and which once 
held the bodies and yet shows the tombs of Voltaire and 
Rousseau, too fitly represents the relations which learn- 
ing and religion have usually held in this centre of 
sceptical science. And yet, close beside it is the humble 
bell-tower of the Church of St. Etienne du Mont, where 
Pascal lies, in whom science, genius, and religion met and 
mingled in a higher degree than in any other man of 
men. With a pen as graceful as Rousseau's and as 
witty as Voltaire's : with scientific capacities surpassing 
Cuvier, La Place, or whoever has here studied, he gave 
them all to Christ and the true Church. Pascal should 
be the patron saint of the Latin quarter and of modem 
science. 

But we are sending our eyes far away on their medita- 
tive mission. Let us recall them, and run once more along 
the lines of vision immediately before us. So straight 
are these lines, that when Napoleon looks from the cen- 
tral window of the Tuileries his eye will cut the centre 
of this arch, the memorial of the army, the foundation 
of his dynasty. It will also strike the centre of the 
obelisk that marks the spot where the axe opened the 
way for his rise by chopping off the heads of an older 
dynasty, and where some of the howling democrats, 
whose feet are at his door, may yet perform like service 
to him and his. 

No city in the world has such a stretch of rectilinear 
greatness. Not less than two miles and a half of its 
central space are appropriated to pleasure, power, and 
pride ; royalty petting and riding the tiger of democracy 
which it cannot tame. Along a part of the line the Seine 
flows, forming the boundary of the Elysian Fields and 
the royal palace. Both banks are faced with hammered 
stone, with frequent steps leading to the water. Tasty 
bridges cross it, and bath-houses and barges trick it off as 
if for a holiday. It has no sign of the Thames' life or 



284 PARIS. 

filth ; of its commerce or corruption. It is as finished 
as a dry dock and as elegant as if cut through a palace 
garden. j 

On its farther side, not far from you, is the Field of 
Mars, a broad open space admirable for reviews. Here^ 
too, are the military schools and hospitals, the Hall of 
Deputies, where the Duchess of Orleans offered her son 
for a sovereign, and heard the fatal " C'est trop tard " seal 
his destiny. These and other governmental halls give the 
farther as the hither bank a pomp and luxury that is 
unequalled elsewhere. 

IN THE STREETS. 

Let us descend and take a nearer view of the city. 
Sauntering down the Champs Elysees, among the trees, 
gardens, swings, stalls, cafes, everything to allure the 
eye and pick the pocket, we come to the Place de la 
Concorde. The red obelisk, the ornate fountains, the 
marble groups on each corner, give no hint of its history. 
Turn your eyes Seineward, and the Chamber of Depu- 
ties looks upon you. Turn them in the opposite direc- 
tion, and the Church of the Madeleine lifts its pillared 
splendor. Walking the few steps between you and the 
Madeleine, you find that church at the beginning of the 
most bewitching thoroughfare of Paris, and so, of course, 
of the world. The Boulevards here commence their 
winding way. They are one in fact, though many in 
name. Less crowded than Oxford Street, less splendid 
in their fronts than Broadway, they far surpass them in 
the gayety of the cafes that line the broad walks, dense 
with loungers sitting and sipping wine or coffee, in the 
dazzling attractions of the shops, even in the rush of 
omnibuses and carriages, and the less rapid, but not less 
excited, flow of pedestrians, all seemingly bent on pleas- 
ure alone, with no thought of business or care. You 



PARIS. 285 

have reached " Vanity Fair " at last. Can you walk 
safely through it ? If like Faithful, you may ; if not, 
not. 

For two miles and more this curve of beauty winds, 
closing its present career, as the Champs Elysees concludes 
hers, in a revolutionary centre, the place of the Bastile. 
From that spot, as from the Arc de Triomphe, handsome 
new avenues are radiating in every direction. From it, 
too, old streets, populous and crooked, diverge at every 
angle. But the attractive life of Paris ceases here. 
Our walk may here cease also. If you have gathered 
even an imperfect conception of the aspect and outline 
of Paris, I am content. For only the eye can make 
the shadowy real. May that eye soon forget this de- 
<Sgjription in the clear light of its own perceptions. 



i 




^^^^^9^^^ 


^^^^9 


i^^i^^^M:M^^ 



xvn. 



PARISIA2J CHURCHES. 




I ARIS abounds in churches, though not, I fear, in 
piety. They are often very rich internally, but 
possessed of few external attractions. In this 
respect they are somewhat unlike the people, whose out- 
ward adorning surpasses their inward. New York has 
finer edifices, with one or two exceptions, than London 
or Paris. Within, the last are far superior. Hardly 
any city in Europe equals her in this respect. A few 
only of many sketches can find a place in this portfolio. 



ST. GERMAIN L AUXEKROIS. 

The first thing I stumbled on was a sensation : per- 
fectly natural, you will say, in Paris. Even so ; yet it 
was a sensation, notwithstanding. Prowling around with 
eyes and feet, I entered an odd-looking church, with 
a heavy, highly-garnished porch. It was opposite the 
Louvre. All the churches are open here ; thanks to Ro- 
manism for keeping that bit of good sense alive in her 
organism. When will Protestantism revive it in hers ? 
I had to go many rods out of my way to hunt up sextons 
in England for churches I wished to see, and had to pay 
them for their service. Here they are all open, and 
always gratuitously, with the additional gift of holy water, 
which you can take from the end of a little brush, held 
out by an old man seated in a box by the door. I don't 
like to ride a free horse to death, and therefore, if for no 



PARISIAN CHURCHES. 287 

higher reason, declined the extra gift. After looking 
around the church at the paintings and statues in its 
niches, and enjoying its cool, contemplative pillars and 
roof, I was curious to know its name. Most of these 
churches give no hint of their names. So, after con- 
siderable study of chart and book, I found that I was 
in the church whose bell gave the signal for the St. 
Bartholomew massacre. What a new current of feel- 
ing swept over me ! I had been carelessly tasting it3 
novelties, when I was suddenly thrown back three hun- 
dred years, to that warm August night of 1572. I heard 
that bell, whose plaintive voice had just struck a mid-day 
hour, utter that solemn midnight knell. What were the 
feelings of the sexton as he struck? of the infatuated 
, Catholics that awaited it? of the King, who, from his 
Ypalace window opposite, gave the signal? It was re- 
sponded to by the bell on the Palais de Justice, then a 
royal palace, now a prison, and the work began which 
buried Protestantism in France for ten generations. By 
a divine revenge, there sprang up in its place dissolute- 
ness in the Court and atheism in the schools, and the 
guillotine of the Revolution completed, we trust, the 
solemn judgment of God. 

It was the parish church of the Tuileries, having been 

J,' largely patronized and frequented by extinct royalty. 

r Hence its ceiling was covered with the Bourbon symbol, 

— fleurs de Us on blue ground. It was one of the first 

seats of Christianity, — a church having been built here 

by Childebert in the sixth century. The Normans 

,p levelled it in 886. This building is but four hundred 

^years old. In front of it Prince Coligny was killed, 

£, Tinder the palace window where the King stood. How 

things connect themselves. In Canterbury Cathedral 

you are shown the tomb of his brother, who escaped 

from France at that time, and, with other fugitives, found 

shelter under Elizabeth. A chapel was fitted up for 



288 PARISIAN CHURCHES. 

them in the vaults of the Cathedral, and French service 
is still held there every Sabbath. But few attend ; yet 
with that faithful adhesion to an ordinance, long after it 
has ceased to be vital, which characterizes the British 
mind, they regularly hold the service. 

PALAIS DE JUSTICE AND THE GUILLOTINE GATE. 

Let us finish this chapter of connections. The bell 
that gave the signal to begin the work, as we have said, 
was that on the Palais de Justice, — this one being the 
voice of the Church ; that, the approving order of the 
King; and that very building was the place where his 
own descendants were confined, and from whence two 
went to the block, and another, Louis XVII., to a more 
dreadful death of cruelty and starvation. Let us go and 
look at it. A palace and prison have existed s-uccessively 
there for fourteen hundred years ; though, like the Tower 
of London, it has ceased to be a royal residence ; y&t, 
unlike that, is still in regular use as a court and a place 
for the detention of witnesses. 

You leave the Church of St. Germain TAuxerrois, 
with its tasty Gothic porch, filled with grotesque bas- 
reliefs and paintings, and soon come to the Seine. Walk 
along its granitized bank a hundred or two feet, and you 
cross the oldest of its many bridges, — a handsome stone 
structure, a thousand feet long, built by Henry III., three 
hundred years ago, and adorned with an equestrian statue 
of Henry IV. The bridge leads to a little island in the 
middle of the river, which is the heart of old Paris. On 
it is the Notre Dame, and near it are all the ancient 
points of interest. 

More than London, Paris crowds its earliest history 
into one centre. She shows in this the difference in her 
organization. All things have always centred in her 
monarch. In London three diverse forces have ever 



PARISIAN CHURCHES. 289 

contended for supremacy, — the merchant, the statesman, 
the king, — and their original centres of power were far 
apart. Here all are, and have ever been, one. 

Only a few steps from the bridge, over which kings 
have ridden and plebeians walked for centuries, — with 
that brief interregnum in which plebeians rode, while 
kings walked to their death, — you see on your right a 
large plain pile of masonry, beginning with a homely square 
tower and a little pyramidal cupola upon it. A few feet 
farther on, and two round towers, equally homely, swell out 
from its sides. They are twelve feet apart at their inner 
edge. Between them is a door now closed with iron bars, 
and across the front of the towers, an iron fence. That 
is the door whence the guillotine cart issued every morn- 
ing with its human freight for the shambles. Imagine 
the cart, the summons, the pallid, sleepless, haggard 
victims taking their seats ! See it drive carelessly out, 
pass over the bridge we crossed, or, turning to the right, 
cross the Pont au Change just below, enter E-ue St. 
Honore, a narrow, crooked, long street, but wide enough 
then i<» hold crowds of intensely excited men and women, 
move down its length, come out in front of the Tuileries 
and its gardens, three fourths of a mile from this, and 
transfer its victims to the knife and to eternity. 

Out of that door, Maria Antoinette went, in widow's 
weeds, on her final journey ; her husband having pre- 
ceded her from another prison. Out of it Princess 
Elizabeth, in due time, followed her. "Was not the sin 
of the royal murderer of St. Bartholomew visited upon 
his children, then? Her cell is now a chapel; those 
occupied by other prisoners have been mostly demol- 
ished. I visited her cell. It was with great difficulty 
that a permit was secured. The Emperor, dislikes to 
have any one remember that royalty in France ever 
wore chains and abode in a dungeon. The past might 
become the future, if that knowledge wa& too. general. 
19 



290 ' PARISIAN CHURCHES. 

This fear is increased, when he remembers that here 
too he dwelt a prisoner after his attack on Boulogne. 
But his cell he allows none to see. Only a request from 
Mr. Dayton to the French Secretary of State could win 
me entrance. With this missive the bolts flew back, 
long dark corridors were traversed, and I was usher- 
ed into a low, whitewashed, damp, stone cell, lighted 
by a small window thrust up under the ceiling. It was 
about twelve feet square. Here the petted daughter, 
wife and mother of royalty suffered ignominy and an- 
guish that no tongue can tell. Less than half of this 
little room was allowed her, — her brutal keepers indulg- 
ing in boisterous revelry outside of the screen, behind 
which she paced and prayed, or wept and slept, never 
being left for a moment to herself. How the splen- 
dor, comfort, and bliss of Schonbrunn and Versailles 
must have risen before her in those dreary dreadful 
hours ! Few are the contrasts of equal vividness that 
earth affords. 

But let us balance our pity with contrary pity. The 
victim may seem especially * affecting, but the sacrifice 
was needful, was just. Her house had been the cause 
of agony far greater than hers. The terrors of that hour 
were as nothing to the previous terrors of royal tyranny. 
The Bastile was worse than the guillotine ; the slaughter 
of the Huguenots than that by Robespierre. That 
thunder-cloud wonderfully cleansed this hitherto foulest 
of atmospheres. No nobles were so exclusive and 
haughty as the French ; no royalty so superb and sinful. 
No habeas corpus, no commons, no lords, stood between 
their will and its object. To-day there is practically 
no nobility in France. Napoleon is only a tenant of his 
throne, at the will of the people. He knows a breath 
can unmake him, as a breath has made. 

The perfect level of the people pleases you. An 
American feels entirely at home here. They look and 



PARISIAN CHURCHES. 291 

act, and if we could only converse with them, we should 

find that they talkfed just like us. What few I have 

conversed with are thorough democrats. Said my 

teacher to me, " We have no aristocracy, as in England. 

«'Some keep the ' De ' and other titles, but they are as 

-poor as I am." These titles are like an American Esq., 

-^•or Captain, complimentary, and yet not. They express 

^no landed, and but little political, or official power. 

But twenty -five hundred died in all that time, and the 

French people have been, ever since, democratic, if not 

free. Let us not blame the Revolution. If it seemed 

cruel, it was only seeming. The cruelty was before, and 

"in secret. 

"J' As our civil war, dreadful as it has been, is nothing 
beside the miseries that have been heaped, for genera- 
tions, on our enslaved brethren, so was it with that great 
era. It cut the throat of kingly tyranny here, and made 
every monarch in Europe feel that his honors were 
empty and his seat perilous, if he did not rule in right- 
eousness. 

As we leave this cell. In which, by a strange justice, 
nobespierre was himself confined, we pass through a 
"^longish, lowly chapel, capable of holding twenty or 
thirty persons. Here the Girondists spent that last night, 
so often pictured, in debate, oratory, singing, and frivolity. 
The dreary cave lights up with lurid memories : pride 
and pleasantry on the lip ; pallid horrors curdling the 
A^heart. 

THE MADELEINE. 

My first Sabbath I broke in gratifying curiosity 
■rather than kept in worship. The festival of Corpus 
iChristi was to be celebrated, an idolatrous service, ex- 
cept that it was without idolaters ; neither priest nor 
people believing the divinity to be within it that their 
fathers revered. This ornate, Greek temple, with its 



292 PARISIAN CHURCHES, 

statues and pillars, was crowded with spectators, for so I 
must call them, since they chiefly lodked on ; a very few 
read the prayers, which were themselves very few. The 
principal business was the prostrations and gesticulations 
of priests. They were arrayed in scarlet velvet, with 
gold lace in profusion, and went bobbing round the 
altar magnificent with its statues of Mary Magdalene 
and four angels. Each angel cost $30,000. The injec- 
tion of the cost of an angel into the description of a 
religious service may seem Yankeeish and profane. But 
it fits in properly ; for the whole service seemed to be 
gotten up, regardless of expense, in order to astonish the 
people. It was grotesquely appropriate when one of the 
pompous priests in his yellow satin vestments, and gold 
and purple bands, in the very midst of the genuflections, 
took his pinch of snuflP", and wiped his delectated nose 
with a dirty rag of dingy bandanna. The inner spirit 
of the scene came to the surface in that act. The soiled 
and paltry rag was the true symbol of the spirituality, 
sincerity, and piety of the priests, if not of the people ; 
the violet velvet and royal yellow satin were its deceitful 
coverings. The stately service soon began. Boys in 
scarlet, with red waistbands, waved incense and rang 
bells and held tall candles. Other boys in scarlet, with 
blue ribbons around the waist, carried immense baskets of 
bread across the stage, — no, the chancel. Others, with 
white ribbons, brought in baskets of flowers and scattered 
them on the floor ; the priest wiped and kissed a golden 
plate, and put it to the lips of another, wiped it, and then 
put it to another's lips, then wiped it again, put the wafer 
upon it, and gave it to a half a dozen that alone out of 
the great congregation approached to receive it, — wiping 
the plate each time he laid a wafer upon it. Then they 
formed a procession. First came girls exquisitely dressed 
in white, and with white veils falling over back of their 
heads, and down almost to their feet, and white flowers 



PARISIAN CHURCHES. 293 

in their hands. Singing, they marched, — the boys after, 
more girls, more boys, yet more of each, all with silk 
banners, white and golden. Then men, then a military 
band, then singers in red silk robes, then the chief 
priests, the last under a scarlet canopy and bearing a gold 
cross, before which all were expected to kneel. I noticed 
that but a few bowed or knelt, and as it marched round 
the church under those gigantic pillars, by the side of the 
statues of many who were real saints and disciples, I 
could not but muse on the folly of the scene. Not a 
word was said in that two hours and a half that anybody 
could understand : not a word addressed to that vast and 
intelliorent congregation on Christ and Him crucified. 
All was pantomime, all powerless. May the Lord open 
the way for the speedily spiritual illumination of this 
people. 

ST. GERMAIN DES PRES. 

Wandering in the most ancient and aristocratic quarter 
of the town, where the neglected Bourbonites hide their 
diminished heads, but with no lowering really of their 
crest of pride, I saw the insignificant front of a church 
packed between like soiled and cheap fronts of the decay- 
ing rookeries of poverty. Its belfry was crowned with 
a wooden pyramidj upon which roosts the familiar symbol 
of Puritan piety, — the cock of Peter, or of the dawn, 
or of France. I found out where France got her Gallic 
name and popular sobriquet, and New England her bird 
ecclesiastic. Having seen it since as far south as Italy, 
perched on the spires of Papal churches, it has occurred 
to me that the two symbols of faith in their days were 
the cross and the cock. With a strange perversion of 
taste, our fathers rejected the former and clave to the 
latter. Perhaps they thought it less expressive, and 
therefore less seductive. 
. Seeking a momentary rest, I pushed aside the heavy 



294 PARISIAN CHURCHES. 

leathern veil, — wliich is the usual portal. " How beau 
tiful ! " I instantly exclaimed. " What a glowing gem of : 
art and life is this ! " The Madeleine, in its modern mag- 
nificence ; Notre Dame, with its interlaced roof and wide 
sweeping arches ; even the Sainte Chapelle, with its blaze 
of color, did not diffuse so deep and tender a feeling as 
this seemingly obscurest of temples. Only St. Vincent de 
Paule was its equal, and not its superior. Applying to my 
guide for light, I found, what one always finds, that 
such gems of purest ray serene, when of human origin, 
are not strewn carelessly in the dark unfathomed caves 
of the ocean of humanity. They have a history that 
warrants their array. I was treading very ancient con- 
secrated earth. Thirteen hundred years ago, Childebert, 
son of the first Christian king, who built the other St. 
Germain, laid these foundations in the pre, or meadow 
without the town, as it then was, but in one of its now 
oldest quarters. His name, and that of Bonaparte, are 
given to the two streets on whose corner the Church 
stands. What a space of time those names cover ! 
What greater spaces of events ! Dedicated in 557, it 
was celebrated then for its beauty, and called " The 
Golden Basilica." Only the unseen foundations and 
unseen spirit of that structure remain. The Norman 
levelled it. It was rebuilt in 980, — and we can worship 
within walls that have heard the name of Christ reverently 
pronounced for nearly a thousand years. What if much 
hay and stubble have been heaped upon the cross. There 
it hangs, and many a trembling soul clings to it, and not 
to him who holds it in his priestly hands. This faithful 
adhesion to Jesus Christ and Him crucified is the evident 
reason for the perpetuity and power of the Papal Church. 
This is the true blood, which is the life of man ; and all 
her diseases, severe as they are, have not so corrupted her, 
that it is impossible for the seeking soul to find salvation 
therein. His penetrative grace, by faith, can strike through 



PARISIAN CHURCHES. 295 

the whole superincumbent mass of Mariolatry, infallibilitj, 
indulgence, absolution, and such, and renew the trusting 
penitent in His divine image of power and love. 

Unlike most churches, color is its prevailing character- 
istic. The stone pillars, arches, nave, — everything is full 
of fire. The pillars of the nave are all painted in blue 
and white; those of the choir, in crimson, black, and gold. 
The fretted roof high above you is transformed into a 
starry- vault, where, on a sky of ultramarine, golden 
stars are ever shining. 

But the height of its achievements, and that which 
alone makes me weary you with this description, is the 
paintings that encompass the nave, over the caps of the 
pillars, and above the spandrils of the arch. I have seen 
hundreds of pictures in these churches, some by great 
artists, but none so original, so simple, so beautiful as 
these. Only those in St. Boniface in Munich approached 
them, and they were not equal in idea. M. Flandin was 
the designer. He has lately died. In him disappeared 
not only an artist but a poet, an idealist as well as an 
executor, — a talent rare in his profession as in every 
other. The frescos are in pairs, — a scene from the 
Old Testament placed beside its counterpart from the 
New. These correspondences are as original as the 
paintings, and bespeak the highest order of mind. 

Adam and Eve fleeing affrighted at the voice of the 
Lord is offset by the Birth of Jesus. The very Lord 
they fled from has become their child. And what ad- 
mirable pre-Raphaelism is this picture of the Nativity ! 
Mary lies on her couch in a plain peasant dress, the babe 
beside her, and Joseph sitting at the bedside. Their 
faces, though unconscious of their relation to Grod and 
man, are yet fully conscious, so subtly has the artist 
caught that true expression of the perfect soul. 

Balaam's Burnt -Offering and the Adoration of the 
Magi are a happy parallel. Balaam has his victim upon 



296 PARISIAN CHURCHES. 

the altar ; but is looking up at a star, wMch he sees arise 
out of Jacob. The mountains of Moab and the tents 
of Israel are around and beneath him. But his pro- 
phetic eye sees only that star. That star these wise 
men have followed. It stands over the babe before 
whom — a victim also — they are bowed. How fine 
the analogy and the contrast ! What Balaam, the hea- 
then prophet, perforce declared, these heathen prophets 
gladly follow. The history of the world and the Gospel, 
the compulsory recognition of Christ, and joyful obei- 
sance to Him, are thus felicitously taught. 

The next series is another Bengelian connection, subtle 
and true, — Moses before the Burning Bush, and the An- 
nunciation. The two incarnations are instantly sug- 
gested. The greatness of the latter is seen not the least 
in the prostration and terror of the shepherd as compared 
with the maidenly calm, the reposeful strength of her 
who could say, even in that hour of prophetic suffering 
and sorrow, and, worse than all, of infamy, " Behold the 
handmaid of the Lord ! Be it unto me according to thy 
word " ! One can hardly wonder at the worship of the 
Virgin, M'^hen he sees the proneness of the human mind 
to worship any but God. In our shrinking from Mari- 
olatry, we have ceased to have all the reverence and 
affection that we ought for her who is the most highly 
honored of all created beings, — archangel, angel, or man. 
Let us love and revere " the Mother of our Lord " as 
Elizabeth did. That cannot be sin. 

Melchisedek blessing and oflfering the bread and wine 
to Abraham and his train, is set over against the Lord's 
Supper. Joseph sold into Egypt and Judas kissing Christ, 
is another significant, though recondite affinity. A long 
similitude might be deduced from that conception. The 
kindred crime and its kindred consequences, baleful and 
blessed, open out before us through this narrow gateway. 

The destruction of Pharaoh and the Baptism of 



PARISIAN CHURCHES. 297 

Christ are an unexpected conjunction of affiliated op- 
posites. Water is an instrument of divine vengeance 
and of divine honor. Man is ruined and saved by the 
same element. The Deluge would have been a better 
offset, had this alone been in his mind. But he thought, 
perhaps, of Moses calling down punishment by water 
upon his enemies (for he is the central figure), and Christ 
submitting to it for the salvation of his enemies. 

The Confusion of Babel and the Keys given to Peter 
teach the regatherinoj of sundered and scattered man in 
the Church and the one lanojuase of believers. 

Abraham offering up Isaac and the Crucifixion are a 
palpable analogy, though imbued with freshness and 
strength under this pencil. 

Jonah cast out by the whale, and the Resurrection, 
are the last and greatest of the series. The correspond- 
ence is more familiar, because Christ declared it. Had 
it been left, like many of these, to human ingenuity, we 
should have wondered at its subtle and fruitful signifi- 
cance. Both of these scenes are handled with uncom- 
mon novelty and power. Jonah, naked, is running up 
the beach, just having scrambled upon his feet, after 
being cast out by the hideous monster before us. A 
huge wave is chasing him fiercely, and half submerges 
him in its angry foam, as if it would accomplish the de- 
struction in which the baffled whale had failed. His face 
is full of unspeakable thankfulness and terror. In won- 
derful contrast is the serene majesty of Him who is not 
cast fearfully forth by devouring death at the command 
of God, but rises from his sepulchre as if it were, as 
it was, but the couch of momentary and peaceful slum- 
ber. The sepulchre is not a cave but a sarcophagus, — a 
common stone coffin. The "stone" is the huge slab 
that covers it, which is pushed away as carelessly as if 
it were the silken coverlet of a bed of down. He is thus 
brought nearer to us in fate and in consolation, than if 



298 PARISIAN CHURCHES. 

seen emerging from a cave. It is at once more terrible 
and more triumphant to come forth from the familiar 
and fearful coffin. 

Bossuet's heart lies in a chapel beside the choir ; his 
body is in the Sainte Chapelle. Des Cartes rests here. 
On a black slab is a gilded epitaph which tells us that 
he first, after the revival of letters in Europe, vindi- 
cated and asserted the laws of human reason with the 
authority of Christian faith, and now enjoys the light of 
the truth which he alone then worshipped. " Qui primus 
a renovatis in Europa bonarum litterarum studiis rationis 
humanse jura salva fidei Chris tianse auctoritate vindicavit 
et asservit. Nunc veritatis quam unice coluit conspectu 
fruitur." 

Other tombs and trophies testify to the high position 
it holds. But nothing ensures it its high place so much 
as the rare conceptions of Flandin. Be sure, if you see 
Paris, to enjoy the frescos of St. Germain des Pres. 

ST. ROCH AND ARCHBISHOP MANNING. 

The Archbishop was but an archdeacon when I heard 
him. He has since towered into the Papal primacy of 
England, and will doubtless into one of the cardinalships 
of the world. His elevation to the mitre of Westminster, 
recalls a summer morning hour spent in that pleasantest 
of bowers, the cool and shaded arches of a church. Look- 
ing over the calendar of " Galignani," at breakfast, to find 
some stimulant for my already ennuyed curiosity, I saw 
that he was announced to preach that morning at the 
Church of St. Roch. I concUided that the day might 
properly open with such a novelty. This church has 
other attractions than the one especially sought. History, 
art, music, monuments, make it one of the most attractive 
temples of Paris. It stands in the Rue St. Honore, the 
Nassau Street of Paris, equally crowded and narrow, 



PARISIAN CHURCHES. 299 

but cleaner, longer, and better set off with shops, and 
running behind and parallel with the costlier Rivoli, as 
that with Broadway. 

A row of steps extends along the whole front of the 
church, rising some fifteen feet to the entrance. The 
fagade is in good taste, but not ornate nor majestie. 
You can pause on these steps a moment, and recall two 
or three scenes of which they were a witness and a sharer. 
Louis the Great and Anne of Austria laid its corner- 
stone ; so that it possesses that high quahty in its origin 
which, in spite of ourselves, attracts ourselves. Yet 
sufficiently democratic scenes have attended its history 
to satisfy the greatest lover of compensation. The peo- 
ple of the Revolution crowded these steps, as Paul de la 
Roche, following fact, places them, in his well-known 
picture, to see Marie Antoinette led to the guillotine. 
You can easily reproduce the sad and savage scene. 
The scowling mob, the tall, hard grenadiers, the solemn 
face of the doomed, and the end not far off. Go down 
the street a half a mile, turn to your left, and the 
Place de la Concorde is before you. There royalty 
bled unto the death in France. It has sprouted often 
since, and grown to a tiny height, but the axe of demo- 
cracy comes down upon it ere it attains the solidity of a 
tree, and the bushy branches are levelled to the root. 
That root itself will be extirpated ere many years, and 
the tree of democracy and Christianity be the tree of 
life to this priest-ridden, tyrant-ridden people. 

Here happened a second act in that strange, eventful his- 
tory. Bonaparte here planted his cannon, which swept both 
the mob that opposed, and the Directory that commanded 
him, into destruction. The young artillerist achieved 
much in that cannonade. He subdued Paris and France 
at one charge. Well had it been for himself, no less for 
Paris, France, and the world, had he also then subdued 
himself. Yet no one man can create his era. His am- 



300 PARISIAN CHURCHES. 

bition did not destroy republicanism ; his retirement, had 
he chosen that course, could not have saved it. The 
people were not ready for it, because they were not fit 
for it ; and their unfitness arose from the very cause that 
led us hither, — their religion. It will be found impos- 
sible, we believe, to mamtain a true democracy where 
Papacy is the ruling religion. Its forms, ideas, history, 
and spirit are hostile to the liberty, equality, and fra- 
ternity of man. We must yet meet that question in 
America. Romanism, as a form of Church government, 
must be destroyed ere the world is saved. This necessity 
is seen in a third event that also transpired here. The 
mob of 1848, stealing a cross from the Tuileries, rever- 
ently march up these steps and deposit it upon the altar. 
That was a great improvement outwardly, we trust in- 
wardly, on the procession which their fathers made in 
honor of a courtesan as the Goddess of Reason. Yet 
their faith was still but darkness. The gilded image of 
a cross is as powerless to save as a wretched woman. 
The second Napoleon seized on this last overfaith, as the 
first did on the former unfaith, and made it the instru- 
ment of his success. Through Papacy he rules. What 
they want is faith in God, in Christ, and in themselves 
as His servants, humble and true. Then comes endur- 
ing political regeneration, because following that which 
is spiritual and personal. 

But, leaving these loquacious steps, let us enter the 
church. It is of the usual sort ; , a lofty arched nave, 
costly and gaudy choir, chapels running around its walls, 
with pictures, statuary, and tombs. The chief of the last 
are the tombs of Corneille and the Abbe de I'Epee, the first 
teacher of deaf mutes. Behind the choir are two large 
chapels ; the first, a gorgeous reproduction of the Holy 
of Holies. There is the golden altar and ark, the shew- 
bread and tables, with the light of the Shekinah painted 
above. That painted Shekinah is an exact type of the 



PARISIAN CHURCHES. 301 

Papal Church. Its glory is all human, artificial, lifeless. 
The divine glory dwells not with it as in its earliest his- 
tory ; but, like the Jews of the times of Christ, they 
refuse to see the true light, and hasten to extinguish it 
in the ferocity of their hate and the pomp of their preten- 
sions. Behind this chapel is another, with a sculptured 
pile of rock representing Calvary, on which, high up in 
a recess, is a marble crucifixion. Near by, another pile 
of rock and group of statuary reproduce the entombment. 
Very striking are these, and, with a beautiful statue of 
the Madonna in yet another recess, under a starry canopy, 
and glittering with candles, combine to give the chapel a 
most unique and fascinating aspect. The Chapel of the 
Virgin was full, while that of the Holy Sacrament, as 
the outer one was called, was nearly empty. 

But we linger about the church rather than gather 
around the preacher. It is not the un wisest course ; 
for the church is innocent as well as interesting. It 
may teach truth to those who will read it aright. Not 
so the preacher. Yet let us listen. Perhaps we shall 
find some wheat even among his tares, which shall 
strengthen our possibly too sceptical faiths. 

A thin congregation of English-looking persons are 
seated in chairs about the middle of the nave, around a 
pulpit hung up against a pillar. The organ and singers 
have been giving forth exquisite music, such as my ears 
never drunk in before, — so soft, round, full, divine. No 
wonder this system retains its power, when it commands 
the service of such accessories. 

The music dies away, and the beadle is heard striking 
his staff on the pavement, as he strides pompously to the 
foot of the pulpit pillar. He is followed by the preacher, 
who hastens up the stairs, and, with no preliminary but 
a word of prayer, begins his discourse. He is a tall, 
spare man, between fifty-five and sixty. His voice is 
thin and light, his manner quiet but intense, as though 



302 PARISIAN CHURCHES. 

he held himself in with bit and bridle, and could storm 
fearfully were it necessary. He was dressed in a pur- 
ple robe, white embroidered muslin sleeves, and a jaunty 
black cap, looking more like a smoking-cap than that of 
a priest. The two doubtless equally express conviviality 
and consecration. This cap he raised from his head when- 
ever he pronounced the name of Christ, though I noticed, 
in the fervor of his discourse, or in the immaturity of his 
conversion, he forgot to lift it several times when he 
spoke the sacred name. Probably as archbishop he will 
be more watchful than he was when merely archdeacon. 

It was the festival of Corpus Chris ti, and his subject 
was the " Presence of Christ in the Church ; " the text, 
" Lo, I am with you all the days till the consummation 
of all things." His faith was so full that it burst forth 
almost in the first word, and continued to the end. 

" The Church," he said, " comes from the body or 
earthly presence of Christ. The mystical and sacra- 
mental church both spring from his natural body. As 
the first Eve was formed from the side of the first Adam, 
so the second Eve was created out of the second Adam. 
Before the incarnation there was no Church. The elect 
existed, scattered and disjoined ; but there was no body, 
no church, for no body of Christ could be when as yet 
the head was not." 

I thought of " the Church in the Wilderness " that 
Stephen so ignorantly declared unto the Jews, and won- 
dered how much shorter would have been his address 
on that occasion had he told them their fathers had no 
ecclesiastical being. But this was essential to the 
preacher's unreason. For he would have then had to 
trace the Papal supremacy to Caiphas rather than to 
Peter, and it would have conflicted badly with the the- 
ories he professed. 

From this natural and material relation of the Church 
to Christ he deduced all the favorite points of his creed. 



PARISIAN CHURCHES. 303 

The Church is one ; there cannot be two bodies for one 
head. It is indivisible. Whatever is cut from it per- 
ishes. All fragmentary Christianities are but the crum- 
bling debris of the eternal mountain of Romanism. It is 
immortal ; the body cannot die so long as its head, Christ, 
and its heart, the Holy Ghost, are alive. It can never 
err, because its head is truth. With an infallible voice, 
it utters the decisions of the infallible reason that proceed 
from the infallible Mind which illuminates it. Hence, 
finally, its decrees are sovereign ; not only in its sphere, 
but in the earth. No civic power can control it, or have 
equality beside it. It is the supreme, the solitary voice 
of God to men. 

The second division he dwelt upon with the greater 
ardor, chiefly because its conclusions were the more ab- 
surd. From the natural body of Christ springs the sacra- 
mental as well as the ecclesiastical body. As life from 
the dying seed so came this life from the dying Saviour, — 
so the Church from Calvary. He withdrew his visible 
presence from Jerusalem that he might manifest himself 
throughout the world in his eucharistic presence. That 
this was his real presence, his own words prove, " Lo I 
am with you all the days ; " not as a spirit, " for a spirit 
hath not flesh and bones as ye see me have ; " a spirit is 
not substance, but he is present as a substance, and that 
can only be in the real presence in the eucharist. The 
whole Church is but the Shekinah where his sacramental 
presence dwells. 

He dwelt upon the desolation of those who reject this 
truth. Constantinople, as it was and is, was finely 
pictured. England was painted in equally dark colors. 
Her cathedrals and churches were fondly and longingly 
described. A true Briton he evidently was, no less than 
a true Papist. 

He again referred to his sacramental profanities, as 
though he knew some who found them hard to swallow, 



304 PARISIAN CHURCHES. 

stating that the experience of this real substance in the 
Eucharist, the flesh and bones of Christ in their crispy 
wafer, was to be found only in faith. Christ gives him- 
self bodily; but he must be received spiritually. He 
gives himself flesh and blood ; we must eat him heart and 
soul. This makes the receiver superior to the giver, as 
much as spirit is above matter. It also dodged the dif- 
ficulty it sought to reduce ; for what is my faith to the 
priestly power? His anointed hands make the wafer 
God. Can my unanointed lips destroy that divinity? 
Then I am master of the priest, pope of the Pope. It 
must be real flesh in my teeth whether I discern it or 
not, and its divine power possesses me whether I will 
or not. 

His allowing the faith of the individual to be one of 
the elements in Transubstantiation, is going a good ways 
towards Protestantism. 

But it is not my intention to criticize, but only to 
report, the discourse. It has many other gulfs which it 
leaped but did not bridge, especially the ignoring of all 
reference to the blood of Christ. He only said, " He 
that eateth my flesh, shall live by me," carefully omitting 
" and drinketh my blood " ; for these tempters and seduc- 
ers of the second and unerring Eve, the Church, have 
appropriated the cup to themselves ; and the gusto with 
which they pour it down their throats shows that they 
have a carnal if not a spiritual apprehension of its 
virtues. 

Such is the faith and zeal of England's new Papal 
primate ; an adroit mixer of truth with error, solely in 
the interests of error ; one who can take the great facts of 
the Atonement and the Church and make them vehicles 
of idolatry, superstition, imperialism, persecution, heresy, 
and every sin. He will be found as subtle and energetic 
as his predecessor. AVith less scholasticism, he has more 
popular gifts. His preaching is easy, elegant, and earnest. 



PARISIAN CHURCHES. 305 

He will push the cause he represents with unceasing 
vigor, while his once influential position in the Establish- 
ment may enable him to make inroads upon its half- 
papistic sections. If it shall result in its dismemberment, 
and in casting the whole Protestant force of the kingdom 
as a unit against the aggressor, it will be for the best to 
all the churches and all the realm. 

It was pleasant to escape from the pestiferous breath 
of such perversions of the blessed truth as it is in Jesus, 
into the purer air of the secular and sinful streets with- 
out. They are worldly and wicked, but not hypo- 
critical. They do not call sin virtue, though they do 
pleasure. The one solicits, the other seduces. Both are 
of the Wicked One ; but the last is his most useful ally. 
Not till such heresies and heresiarchs are overthrown, 
will the world be renewed unto Christ. 

In form, complexion, looks, and manners, the Archbishop 
strikingly resembles Jefferson Davis. Both are traitors 
to the truth they once professed ; both leaders in great 
rebellions. May the superior rebellion which he directs 
speedily follow the lesser one of America, and Papacy 
with its chief priests lie down in the dust by the side 
of slavery and its potentates. 




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xvin. 

A DAY IN PARIS. 

AM painfully sensible of the meaning of the 
well-known French saying about the embarrass- 
ment of riches. Paris overwhelms me with its 
abundance. I cannot see my way out of my embarrass- 
ment better than to give you a diary of the sights and 
explorations of one day. I have no love for diaries, and 
consider them usually about the dullest kind of writing 
and of reading. I presume this effort wiU but confirm 
me in my opinion. If a man deliberately sits down and 
talks with himself in this manner, he is apt to be neither 
witty nor wise. I do not recall, at this moment, a single 
diary of genius. Those of leaders inaugurating and 
developing civil or religious movements — Washington's, 
Adams's, Wesley's, and Asbury's — have an official and 
historic value, but only a very little literary or intel- 
lectual. We do not read such journals to learn the 
quality of their mind. They would never be read at all 
had they not achieved greatness otherwise. Those who 
are not engaged in such enterprises may therefore sus- 
pend their weary daily summaries of all the big and little 
matters in which they have intermeddled. But while 
this sort of writing is stale, flat, and unprofitable, it is 
rich and rewardful to jot down the thoughts that spring 
up to the surface from the unconscious depths of your 
being, and which, if not instantly caught, will drop back 
into their dark unfathomed caves ; " the obstinate ques- 



A DAY IN PARIS. 307 

tionings, fallings from us, vanishings," which show more 
than all else how vast and how deep is the sea of being 
over which your little bark of consciousness is sailing 
alone. Transfix these with your pen on your journal, 
and they will be valuable both now and in the future, 
for yourself, perchance for the world. Call them seeds 
of things, flying fish, ignes fatui, whatever you please. 
John Foster's Life has a thousand of these germs, many 
of them of the rarest quality. Apart from that, one dis- 
likes to bring the inner and innermost life into this upper 
'iair. It is not the medium in which they were born and 
where they can live. Byron was right in saying 

" I '11 live and die unheard 
With a most voiceless thought, sheathing it as a sword." 

And yet no man, after all, more completely revealed 
himself in his writings than he. So did Foster ; so may 
others, who profess and perhaps imagine that they blind 
their friends as to the secrets of their hearts. The roofs 
of our souls are open, like those of Eastern houses ; and 
our neighbors are all Asmodei, and see and know all that 
is going on within. 

But I am writing an essay, not a journal. Very 
well ; you will be more likely to read it. Having trav- 
elled alone from nine o'clock in the morning till nine at 
night, I cannot better spend the hour or two before mid- 
night and sleep arrive, than in going over my day's work 
with you. If you get tired, listen to the music of that 
band that comes from the beautiful concert-garden on 
the opposite side of the Champs Elysees. 

ST. DENIS. 

The first point we aim at is the Church of Saint Denis. 
If you desire to be really Parisian, you must say, Saaingg 
Denee, with much more of a nasal twang than your Amer- 
ican breeding requires for its own use. We mount an om- 
nibus under the Arch of Napoleon, and move round the 



A DAY IN PARIS. 

city from the west to the north, over a broad Boule- 
vard, hard, smooth, well sprinkled, and lined with trees. 
We are in the corporation, and among compact streets, 
but in a new part of the town that resembles an Ameri- 
can city in brightness, briskness, and broadness. Its 
houses, however, are all of stone. Brick is rarely if ever 
used. It is a half-crystallized or marbleized white lime- 
stone, which cuts so easy that all the carving and polish- 
ing are done after the house is built. When you see 
one of these fine houses going up, you would think it 
was but rough blocks, like plaster or adobe houses, piled 
on each other. Wait awhile, and it will be covered with 
sculpture. Cornices, heads, statues, all beauties, will come 
out of the ugly mass. These would crumble in building 
if put on at first, but grow harder with exposure. 

A few rods from our starting point we pass the Pare 
Monceaux, which is an admirable specimen of how much 
the French can do with a little. It contains only ten or 
ia dozen acres ; and yet in that small compass there is a 
grotto, a hill, a waterfall, a high bridge spanning a drive, 
a ruin of a long row of pillars, — beside a lake under the 
trees, — a river, thickets, gardens, drives, with flowers and 
fountains in abundance. It is a perfect gem, though 
originally, probably, flat and waterless. 

Next comes Montmartre, a hill with its cemetery, in 
which many English, and not a few Americans, sleep. 
For Paris is not Paradise in its immortality, however 
much some may fancy it is in its enjoyability. After a 
ride of two miles, we reach the street which leads to St. 
Denis. Hence to the Royal Cathedral is three miles ; 
and as it is a beautiful summer morning, and we are pre- 
tending to rough it, we go a-foot. 

The road is as straight as an arrow, and is called La 
Grande Rue, or the Great Street, partly for its width, but 
chiefly for its uses. We soon leave the city pavements 
with the close-built houses, and close-packed smells that 



A DAT IN PARIS. 309 

all cities and ships possess, and, passing the tasty iron 
gates of the fortifications, enter the country. 

The street is very wide, and lined with four rows of 
trees, large and luxuriant. A walk under them can be 
but agreeable, especially when we remember that the 
clergy of Paris have more than once walked over this 
road. Once, it is said, in full array of purple and scarlet 
and fine linen, they went on foot all the way from Notre 
Dame to St. Denis to meet a king. Being both priest 
and king, as we pray that we and all our countrymen 
and all the world may be forever, we have a double 
right to perform this journey on foot. And now, as we 
go, let me tell you what we are going for. For some of 
you don't know, and the wisest of you don't know as 
much as you think you do. For instance, can you teU 
me, Dear Scholasticus, you who know all about St. Denis, 
who he was, when he lived, how he died, where he was 
buried, and how he came to be the patron saint of Paris 
and of France ? You scratch your head, and well you 
may, for all the libraries of America and Europe cannot 
answer those questions. 

Wishing myself to examine this subject, I went to 
the Bibliotheque Ste. Genevieve last night, a fine library 
of two hundred and ten thousand volumes, and yet less 
than half of the Imperial Library ; but that is not open 
evenings. I made known my wishes through a Germa,n, 
English, and French interpi^eter ; but the librarian had 
no life of St. Denis, did not know anything about him, 
and handed me a little volume on the Abbey and the 
Church. This debated the question as to his death and 
burial-place, but said nothing about him. Attacking the 
chief librarian with my broken French, he also said there 
was no life of him here ; but at last summoned one of 
those remarkable men found in every library, who know 
just where every book is and what is in it, — and that is 
all they know. He brought me three books ; a ponderous 



310 A DAY IN PARIS. 

folio, an ancient quarto, and a modern octavo. The first 
discussed at tedious length, in stateliest French, the ques- 
tions of his burial, but said nothing about him. The 
second, like some other books I liave seen, had a list, three 
or four pages long, of authors consulted in getting up this 
remarkable biography, and was full of Latin quotations 
confirming its positions, and yet had no biography to tell 
nor positions to confirm. The last was a snug modern 
Eoman Catholic magazine, that told you just what yott 
wanted to know in half a column, and yet, like Romanism 
too in that, pretending to know everything, it told you 
nothing, because it knew nothing. 

From them all I gathered that St. Denis was an 
Athenian and an Areopagite ; that he came to Rome in 
the year 72 ; that he was sent to Gaul under St. Ignatius 
and by Pope Clement ; that he was beheaded A. d. 272 
and 292 ; that a heathen woman, touched with sympathy, 
begged and buried his body ; that a Christian woman 
stole it away while they slept and buried it ; that on that 
spot they built the Abbey, now and for many centuries 
the sepulchre of the kings of France. You see how 
happily these Catholics agree. Said I not truly you 
could not answer all the questions on this subject? The 
infallible Pope would be puzzled, possibly. All we know 
is, that Denis was a missionary, who preached the gospel 
to these poor heathen, and was murdered by the rulers, 
just as those who worship him now would murder us if 
they dared, for preaching the very gospel that he pro- 
claimed — salvation by faith in Jesus Christ. It is cer- 
tain that a church was built here to his memory in the 
fifth century. A tradition of Paris is that the street 
that bears his name was marked out by him as he walked, 
with his head in his hands, seeking a grave. If so, it 
might have been good policy to have beheaded some of 
the other surveyors of the streets, for his street is one of 
the straightest of the ancient city. It is enough to know 



A DAY IN PARIS. 311 

that he was a good Christian of the time before super- 
stition and error had largely invaded the Church. 

But letting St. Denis sleep, we may remember that 
we are walking over a road that is the most solemn, in 
one sense, in France. For thirteen hundred years its 
dead kings have been carried over it. Through the 
street of St. Denis they made their royal entrance ; for 
it was the Broadway of Paris. Through it, too, they 
made their royal exit. Nine tenths, probably, of her 
kings were carried hither from their palaces. Wherever 
they died, whether at Paris, Versailles, or elsewhere, they 
are brought here to rest. So you can get up in your 
mind, if you choose, all that funereal pomp, as we are 
drawing near to the church ; the long procession of priests 
in black with white vestments ; the soldiers, bands, ban- 
ners craped, carriages, and people ; while Dagobert, Pepin, 
Louis, or Francis, rides among them, cold and stark in 
his pompous shroud. 

The church is imposing, but not so much so as one 
would expect. Externally, it consists of one tower, three 
doors, a large rose-window, and all manner of grotesque 
carving in stone. Part of this was built by Charlemagne ; 
but his church, as that before, was chiefly rebuilt in the 
twelfth century by Abbe Segur, and afterwards improved 
by St. Louis in the thirteenth century. So the latest 
dates of the latest erections give us six centuries of solid 
time on which to build up our imaginations. 

Two mottoes over the central porch, one by the Abbe 
Segur and one by Louis Philippe, are strikingly diverse 
in taste. The Abbe asks that St. Denis may pray that 
he shall get to heaven for showing this labor of love for 
Christ and his church. Louis Philippe says that Napo- 
'leon sought to restore the fruit of centuries, which a raging 
tempest in one day destroyed. But he too fell by a like 
ruin, and Philippe completed the work. 

" JRursus pendet opus, nam concidit ipse ruina 
At qui perficeret coepta, Philippus erat." 



312 A DAY IN PARIS. 

Napoleon III. can add that Louis Philippe likewise 
tumbled ere he had finished the work he had undertaken ; 
and somebody may say the same afterwards of him. 

Enter. It is imposing, very ; pillars, arches, aisles, 
all. All churches here are generally alike. First a 
nave, or central aisle, broad and high, the farther half or 
third, usually but not always, separated by a screen^ or 
organ, or railing, from the first ; so, though the roof shows 
the whole length, the floor does not. Then side-aisles, 
not often as high-arched as the centre, pillars on both 
sides of them, and from the outer pillars to the walls 
little enclosures, railed in front, and walled on the sides. 
These are called chapels. On these walls usually are 
paintings or statues. Each has an altar and a confes- 
sional. They go around the church. Some of them are 
very handsome, and adorned in a very costly style ; es- 
pecially those in the rear of the choir, or at the extreme 
end of the chancel. In the transepts are also chapels. 
Thus is it with St. Denis. In the side-chapels and 
choir are its kings, what is left of them. There Na- 
poleon the Great is to be carried, to be tossed into 
the ditch in due time, probably, as his friends tossed 
his predecessors. For you know — you know that, dear 
Historicus — that those kings who came out here so pre- 
tentiously, and thought themselves so much better than 
their neighbors, were nearly aU taken up in the great 
Revolution, and cast into a trench on the north side of 
the church. " "Where is Louis Fourteenth ? " I asked 
the conductor, who was showing us the few that escaped. 
" Ah, pell-mell," he replied, shrugging his shoulders, and 
tossing out his hands and laughing. What would the 
grand Louis have said had he dreamed that a Frenchman 
could have ever spoken thus irreverently of his ashes ? 
But they know that this is all sham, as much as you 
do, and their voices sound so. The vergers of England 
worship the dust they point out. Every tone is imbued 



A DAY IN PARIS. 318 

with an awful reverence, tempered with sixpences. Here 
it is imbued with the sixpence alone. And that they 
take as though they were ashamed to receive it for such 
nonsense. 

Only three tombs escaped the Democrats, the best of 
which are those of Francis I. and Louis XIII. These 
are set off with statues and canopies. Dagobert's tomb is 
new and Gothic. Napoleon I. is to have his on the right 
of the high altar. Dagobert is on the left, the founder 
of an empire being of course greater than the founder of 
only a kingdom. The windows are profusely and some 
of them splendidly painted, mostly with scenes in the 
lives of the kings. Napoleon, in 1810, is pointing out 
the spot where he would be buried. He was at the top 
of his glory then, and bad entirely forgotten the hole of 
the pit whence he was digged, and into which he was to 
be cast again so soon. The whole look is factitious, 
brilliant, gay, false. I like England's taste much better. 
She does not fix up the royal tombs, not even to wipe off 
their dust. I asked a verger if they never brushed them 
up. " Never," he replied. Most of them are as plain as 
if in a country churchyard, and some have no stone at all. 
As the verger said of several kings in the Abbey, " The 
record of the dean is the only proof that they lie here." 
Good sense like that has had no little to do with the per- 
petuity of the English throne. With all its pride and 
power it is not vain. These Bourbons and Napoleons 
never lack that trait. " I am Emperor, and you must 
know it." " L'etat c'est moiy^ Louis the Great declares. 
Henry VIII. and Elizabeth and William never said they 
were the State ; but they felt that they were, none the less. 

Let us leave the pompous fane, with its little remnant 
of royal dust, and the obliterated and forgotten spot 
where the most of it sleeps, and return to Paris. As 
funeral processions go out slow and return quick, so we 
will take the cars back. They fly along the green- 



314 A DAY IN PARIS. 

banked Seine and soon transfer us from the church of 
the most ancient, to that of the most popular, saint, 

ST. VINCENT DE PAULE. 

A lofty seat, and a broad, deep carriage-way give this 
the air of roominess so seldom attained in a city church. 
An Ionic portico adorns its entrance. The outside, how- 
ever, is not especially attractive. Within, it bursts upon 
you in a splendor, not of architecture but of art : though 
rows of polished red pillars springing fifty feet into the 
air are not without an architectural delight. Its drown- 
ing charm is in its frescos. The genius of M. Flandin, 
which fascinated us in the golden basilica of St. Germain 
des Pres, has here flowered into almost as rich results. 
The three sides, where with us is the plain front of a 
gallery, are adorned with a procession of saints and mar- 5 
tyrs of all ages and of one faith. They move from the 
centre, over the entrance, to Christ, in the vault over the 
altar. He is seated upon his throne, surrounded by 
approving angels. Over the door is an altar, and two 
preachers are near it addressing neophytes, and pointing 
them to the glorious procession of heroic saints that wind 
on either hand along the pillars up to the Captain of their 
Salvation, whose example and spirit they have feebly, 
though to the best of their ability, imitated. 

But few paintings for spuituality, imagination, and 
grace can compare with this calm but jubilant company, i 
All the figures are admirable, and many are unspeakably 
beautiful. Mary Magdalene, with streaming eyes, di- 
shevelled hair, and naked feet ; Queen Helena in her royal 
robes, and her head bent over the sacred cross which she 
carries in her hands ; St. Cecilia with her harp ; Peter 
with the key, and leading the Apostles ; Paul next behind 
with a sword} Charlemagne, St. Louis, Christopherus, 
bending under the weight of the Child Jesus ; — but what 



A DAY IN PARIS. 315 

does this dry cataloguing amount to ? You could study 
them for hours, they are so full of the beauty of devo- 
tion. They are not intended to be worshipped ; so I am 
in no danger of idolatry. But as the portrait of Fletcher 
in his saintliness and Whitfield in his fervor affect you, 
so do these also. I shall not discuss here the subject I 
am drifting upon : what is the true ornamentation of a 
church ? I only wish you could have spent that hour 
with me at St. Vincent de Panic's, and beg you, when 
you come to Paris, to enjoy this Christian luxury. 

We emerge into the light of common day, walk through 
a narrow street, and pass a large building, once conse- 
crated as the halting-place of the bodies of kings on their 
way to St. Denis. For they made two processions and 
two days of it, in order to astonish the people, and because 
they really fancied they were so big they could not be 
buried in one day. They came out of their graves in a 
much shorter time. 



A FUNERAL. 

Here is a church with black hangings over the door ; 
they are trimmed with white, and have the letter R 
wrought in white on the upper part. That is a sign that 
there is a funeral inside ; the " R " is probably for the res- 
urrection. Let us go in and weep with those who weep. 
It is better to go to the house of mourning, even in 
Paris, than to the house of feasting, although this is the 
business as well as pleasure of this city. In the middle 
of the aisle, before the choir, is the coffin, under a pall of 
black velvet crossed with bars of white, wrought silk, 
hanging over a framework a little larger than the coffin ; 
tall candles are burning all around it. In the choir are 
the singers opposite each other, boys and men, with long . 
black robes and white short muslin ones above them ; the 
priests face the altar, back to the coffin. They chant and 



316 A DAY IN PARIS, 

sing the service, sometimes the priest alone, sometimes 
one band of singers, sometimes the other, sometimes all 
together, the organ often joining in. Then they come 
and surround the coffin, and sing and chant as before ; 
then the beadle, a tall, half-military-dressed man, in a 
cocked hat and with a great idton, marches them off; 
each of the men and women present then takes a little 
horse-hair brush and sprinkles the head of the coffin 
with holy water. It is then carried out by four men in 
shining black hats, looking like policemen, probably hired 
undertakers, put into a hearse which looks like a coach, 
and is so far an improvement on ours, and they start off, 
with gentlemen on foot and ladies left behind altogether. 
One poor lady was bowed in agony ; she and two others 
near her seemed the only mourners. I saw another 
funeral with far less display than this a day or two ago ; 
two candles, no singing, a little mumbling, a sprinkle of 
water, and the white, pine, unpainted coffin was removed 
to its five years' home, — for the grave is not the long 
home of a poor Parisian ; in five years his lease expires, 
and he gives way to his brother. 

Death makes us all brothers, and though I could not 
understand the words, I could their spirit and tone and 
meaning. I knew they were singing of death and of 
Him who hath abolished death and brought life and im- 
mortality to light through His gospel. Thanks be unto 
God for that unspeakable gift. 

This church of St. Nicholas has been built, some of it 
over seven hundred years. It has witnessed many, many 
such griefs as this; it probably will many more. 

Some beautiful pictures are on its walls, and a series of 
carvings in oak of events in the Old Testament and the 
life of Christ ; very grotesque are some of them, — all very 
animated. Moses in the ark is moving down stream very 
rapidly, and the women hurrying to stop it. Daniel is 
being let down into the lion's den in a swing. The den 



A DAY IN PARIS. 317 

is full of men that they are devouring ; one is vainly 
trying to fly a fierce lion who is about to spring upon 
him ; another has his head already in the jav^s. For foot- 
square carvings they are very expressive ; those of the 
Passion of Christ are touching and powerful. 

THE STREETS. 

A few rods and we come upon the spot where a tower 
stood, in which Louis XVI. and his wife were confined, 
and whence he went to his death. Touissant L' Ouver- 
ture, a greater man, also pined away here, with thoughts, 
like those of Louis, of revolution ; unlike him, of the lib- 
erty of his people. It was an old fortress of the Knights 
Templars, and has been demolished, and a petite park 
is in its place, full of flowers, sporting children, smoking 
men, and knitting women. No bad substitute ; yet the 
air is full of memories that their forgetfulness cannot 
obliterate. 

Close by is the queerest thing in Paris, — the market 
for old clothes. Under low roofs are little stalls with 
passages a foot or two wide ; each stall is full of second- 
hand articles, — dry-goods, clothing, shoes, caps, dresses, 
furnishing goods, each a separate department. It is full 
of customers ; the goods look respectable, and are prob- 
ably cheap. This institution is so profitable that the gov- 
ernment is going to put up an enormous iron building, 
artistic and spacious ; and a half a million of francs have 
been given for the rent of it. There are to be twenty- 
four hundred divisions, of four square yards. Twenty- 
four hundred shops under one roof! Just think of it 
when you have leisure. 

Let us go out on the Boulevards. How lively they 

>jare ! We emerge upon them at the Porte or Arch of 

St. Denis, erected by Louis the Great to commemorate 

his glories ; but near its pedestal are bigger words than 



318 A DAY IN PARIS. 

any he put upon it, — " Liberte, Egaiite, Fraternite." Na- 
poleon has ahnost obliterated them ; but they are not quite 
washed out, and he knows that 

"Even in their ashes live their wonted fires." 

They will blaze forth again. How expressive those 
words are ! America has not yet learnt them in all 
their fulness ; to one sixth of her people she may be 
willing to give liberty, but not equality, and especially 
fraternity. She must do it. They are our brethren : 
we must treat them as such. 

You would not think that this broad and brilliant 
street had been the scene of many a bloody struggle. 
Yet it has. Where those words are printed, battles, in 
all their political revolutions, have been fought. Even 
as late as the last coup-d'etat, this gateless gate and 
the neighboring one of St. Martin were the scenes of 
Napoleon's bloodiest carnage. The crowds, witnessing, 
^ as they supposed, a military display, suddenly became 
the recipients of showers of bullets that made the streets 
run blood. Kinglake's past looks sadly upon you from 
the gay present. Walking half a mile up this broad side- 
walk, filled with chattering loungers or sitters at the tables 
in front of the cafes, tasting their creams and wines, and 
we are at the site of the Bastile, now an open space with 
a lofty iron column, a gilded statue of Liberty, poised on 
one foot, having a torch in one hand and a broken chain 
in the other. This does not look like the dreary prison, 
with its secret cells and life-long inmates and unutterable 
miseries. We began with the scattered tombs and dust 
of kings ; we end with this levelled pile. They deserved 
the retribution. They treated their brothers as dogs : 
how should they themselves be treated ? Vengeance 
and Justice always move in a straight line ; so did the 
Divine vengeance of that hour. " They will yet tempt 
the people to idolatry," said their Jeffersons and Jacksons, 



A DAY IN PARIS. 319 

and they scattered the ashes so that it might not be 
moulded again into golden calves to seduce and destroy 
the people. What they feared has happened. Napoleon 
is trying to make them worship men, not principles. He 
will not succeed. Let America expel slavery and caste 
from her soil, and the people will soon drive monarchy 
from Europe. Louis Philippe tried to make this monu- 
ment help to establish his family : he made it a me- 
morial of his rise to power ; but they took his throne from 
the Tuileries, brought it three miles through the rejoicing 
Boulevards, and burned it here, — on the only spot which 
he had sought to use for his private ambition. So may 
they yet Napoleon's. 

Shall we walk down the noted St. Antoine, the hive 
of revolutions? Its Faubourg, or corresponding street 
beyond the Boulevard, is, as it always has been, narrow, 
crooked, and crowded. That running hence to the Tuil- 
eries has been made straight, as if the people had opened 
a short way to the throne and meant to keep it open. It 
is a very handsome street, called Rivoli, with the upper 
stories, for nearly two miles, built over an arched and 
pillared sidewalk. 

PALAIS ROTAL. 

But it is time to think of dining. To have worked 
so hard in such a city, where eating is supposed to be the 
chief pursuit, and never to have referred to it, argues 
great ignorance of the true vocation of a Parisian ex- 
plorer. Yet it is more Parisian than you suppose. For, 
with a just sense of the excellency of this institution, the 
real business of eating is reserved till the severer and 
grosser work of the day is concluded. A cup of coffee, 
a roll, and an egg, briefly open the day. A dejeuner a la 
fourchette, or breakfast with a fork, is interjected with 
almost equal brevity amid the pressing hours of noon. 
But these burdens beino^ rolled off with the descendinoj 



320 A DAY IN PARIS. 

sun, it is now eminently fitting that the art of eating 
should be joyfully cultivated. And as Handel sat down 
to his compositions amid the music of exultant song, so 
we may engage in this service with like exhilaration of 
soul. Nay, we can have the accompanying music also. 

As we come along the busy Rivoli, the immense pile 
of the Louvre and Tuileries looms up on our right. 
Opposite its nearest, or Louvre front, a square opens, 
breaking the uniformity of the street with its bustling 
fulness of omnibuses. On its farther side a palatial front 
attracts notice. Not the spiritual but the bodily taste 
draws us thither. That is the only palace in the world, 
still occupied as such by an heir of the crown, that is 
used also fov stores and restaurants. Entering a side 
passage, tbs main entrance being guarded by soldiers in 
the royal style, we pass through a long corridor and 
emerge into a shaded arcade running round an open 
quadrangle. The inner side of the walk is lined with 
the shops of jewellers, booksellers, dealers in costly bon- 
bons, or cafes that are world-wide in reputation. The 
second story is devoted almost exclusively to eating. 
Many signs along the walk offer you a dinner for two 
francs. We ascend, and enter light, airy, spacious rooms, 
overlooking the garden and fountain below. Getting 
a chair by the window, you can enjoy the changeful 
spectacle. The viands send forth a pleasant smell, 
with which those of the park below agreeably agree. 
The eye is gratified with the cleanly spectacle within, 
and the brilliant one without. Promenaders are saunter- 
ing before the shops ; dandily dressed gentlemen are 
sipping coffee in the open tents that are permitted to 
invade the edge of the lawn ; a crowd is standing, or 
sitting on the chairs around the fountain, near which is 
gathered a military band, that, by order of the govern- 
ment, here discourses music for an hour each night. The 
music pleases the ear, and the dishes the palate. Every 



A DAY IN PARIS. 321 

sense is in process of feeding at the same time. Thus 
feasting the whole man, we spend the hour over our soup, 
three courses of meat, the concluding comfits, and a cup 
of rare coffee, which, with some difficulty, we obtain in ex- 
change for the cheaper and poorer bottle of wine. Two 
Sous are the expected additional fee to the waiters ; so that 
you accomplish the whole entertainment — sights, sounds, 
odors, and tastes — for the modest sum of forty-two 
cents. If this should seem too large for your purse and 
your prospective expenditures in farther journeyings, you 
can dine a la carte for half the sum ; or, at the humbler 
Cremerie or Bouillon, for from six to ten cents, having 
enough and what is good enough to eat, with the privi- 
lege of conforming to the first law of French gourmands, 
■ — leave off a little before you are done, and so let hunger 
have a chance to grow a new appetite in due season. 

Ere we conclude our slowly eaten dinner, the music 
has ended, the area is empty, and the lights are flashing 
gayly from the corridors below. We walk past the glit- 
tering windows, enjoying the taste with which care and 
barelessness exquisitely combine in their display. See, 
for instance, that jeweller's window full of silver spoons 
tossed in as with a silver shovel, a mass of dazzling ore. 

HOMEWARD. 

Rue Rivoli is radiant with life and light. We wander 
bedazzled beneath its blazing arches, looking at the array 
of pictures, laces, jewels, and all, — the bijouterie of Paris. 
The lightless mass of the imperial buildings, occupying 
the opposite side, lower, heavy and threatening, upon the 
careless crowd of pleasure-seekers that flow beneath it, 
like a phosphorescent current beneath a black o'erjutting 
precipice. It not unaptly typifies the relation of the gov- 
ernment and the people, a cold and frowning tyranny 
overhanging a gay and thoughtless populace. Yet, as the 
21 



322 A DAY IN PARIS. 

stream will ultimately wear away the mountain, so will 
the people this despotism ; and as the most of this mag- 
niificent pile is now devoted to their culture in art, sci- 
ence, and literature, so will the rest be to their self-gov- 
ernment. 

The Place de la Concorde introduces us to a new type 
of life. The Champs Elysees are in all their glory. 
Vanity Fair is in full dress. Bands are executing the 
finest music to inside sitters and outside listeners, who 
are permitted to stand and hear, but who cannot so 
much as lean upon a post or tree. The police compel 
them to abandon that relief. If they cannot literally 
" stand it," they must leave, or pay their franc and take 
the desired seat within the railing. Handsome singers, 
" dressed to kill" (I am afraid that is too true a phrase), 
under canopies glowing with silken draperies, flowers, 
and scores of burning jets, sing to sipping ice-creamers 
and wine^bibbers, sitting under the trees. The refresh- 
ments are sold, the concert free. Intermingled with these 
are circuses, merry-andrews, Punch and Judy, circular 
swings, with a ring of youth, often gray-headed, revolving 
in their carriages or upon their horses. The lights of 
hundreds of carriages moving up and down the avenue 
complete the changeful panorama. But all this is to be 
seen, not told. How can black ink and white paper 
produce the enticing bewilderments of the place and 
hour? 

BON SOIR. 

Thus ends our day in Paris, and a hard day's work it 
has been. Still it will take twenty such to " do " the 
town. It was ten when I began this journal, and now 
it is after two in the morning. To the long work of the 
day has been joined the long work of the night. The 
music I told you to relieve yourself with at the begin- 
ning, ceased an hour ago. Sweepers are moving through 



A DAY IN PARIS. 323 

the street, doing their cleansing work when nobody can 
be soiled by it. The mighty city is dropping off to sleep. 
Its sorrowful, joyful, wicked, pious hearts are still. Here 
and there are anxious watchers, agonized mourners, pain- 
riven victims going through the dark river, with light I 
hope upon their faces. Here and there are revellers and 
wretches, restless in sin^ But most, whether sinful or 
saintly, sorrowful or sorrowless, are in the arms of sleep 
and of God ; for He causeth his sleep, as well as his sun, 
to come upon the evil and the good. Nothing is more 
awe-inspiring than to walk the streets of a great city 
when its millions are thus as it were alive in death and 
dead in life. But He that keepeth them doth neither 
slumber nor sleep. Let us put ourselves in His parental 
arms. 




XIX. 



PICTURES AND PALACES. 




ICTURES and Palaces are more closely united 
in Europe than one at first imagines. Their 
relations are not a little strange. The pictures 
were first introduced into the palaces as a royal luxury. 
The eyes of plebeians, except as servants of the court, 
never rested upon them. Their own fathers would not 
have been allowed to gaze upon them after their adop- 
tion into the royal family. Till the French Revolution, 
these galleries were enjoyed only by patricians. Now, by 
a not unfamiliar law, the pictures are almost the sole 
preservative of many palaces. The ivy upholds the 
crumbling wall. In France, Germany, and Italy they 
occupy often the vacant haunts of royalty ; and the peo- 
ple see gratuitously, and are considered to own, both the 
palace and its costly contents. Paris appropriates three 
royal palaces chiefly to art ; one of them, Versailles, has 
that use alone. Florence, Rome, Vienna, Venice, share 
the common lot. When will Windsor and Buckingham 
be like unto them ? 

The Louvre is the first and the last fascination of 
Paris. Temples, streets, cafes^ and parks, all yield the 
palm to art. Hither then let us wend our way. I have 
kept from it far longer seemingly than in fact, and that 
instinctively ; for I have shrunk from inviting you to 
walk along this colorless page and fancy yourself gazing 
on the brilliant walls of this palace of genius. 



PICTURES AND PALACES. 325 

The most fascinating objects are the least easily de- 
scribed. We yield to their power in speechless emotion. 
To portray them is to equal them. We can as readily 
paint the pictures in colors as with the pen. But you 
may say, " Do not the copyists, so busy everywhere 
before these masterpieces, reproduce the renowned orig- 
inals ? " Far from it. If they could, they would paint 
equally renowned originals of their own. No man wiU 
copy when he can create. They give the elements of 
the picture, its forms and colors, but its life and glory, 
its subtle something, which is its genius, no copyist can 
catch unless equal to the creator. As easily can the 
translator give the perfect original as the painter his. 
If Pope or Cowper, Tennyson or Longfellow translate 
Homer, they give us a better picture than mere scholars 
and rhymers do, though far below the master, and far 
below even their own original productions. Who puts 
Cowper's " Homer " by the side of his " Task" ? His play 
was his work ; his work, his play. 

If, therefore, artists cannot give you the pictures of 
Paris, much less can I. But as the poorest copies are 
suggestive of their marvellous originals, so my bald, 
black, skeleton lines may dimly represent the grand 
creations. 

They are collected in two galleries, — that of the 
'Louvre and that of the Luxembourg. Let us look first 
at the former. I have told you how its buildings lie 
between the Seine and the Rue Hivoli. Several pas- 
sages for carriages pass through the quadrangle from the 
street to the river. The most celebrated of these is the 
Place du Carrousel, not far in the rear of the Tuileries. 
Entering there, the whole inner area lies before you ; a 
light iron fence prevents a near approach to the imperial 
rooms. The Emperor wishes the people kept at a mod- 
est distance. He may yet find the fence as little of a 
barrier as were the wooden houses that stood here in the 



326 PICTURES AND PALACES. 

days of the Revolution, and from which the sans-culottes 
easily leaped into the gardens below and the palace be- 
yond. Turning your eyes from that which is inaccessible 
without a permit, you see the more elegant buildings that 
join the extreme ends, the old Louvre and the Tuileries. 
These side palaces were begun by the first, but mostly 
erected by the present Napoleon. They are proud mon- 
uments of his reign. Around their sides stand a multi- 
tude of statues of men of France renowned in letters, 
law, and art. This immense structure, extending if in a 
straight line for more than a mile, is appropriated chiefly 
for a free museum of art. :1 

Every department is profusely represented. Libraries, 
models, reminiscences of Napoleon, Egyptian and As- 
syrian marbles, Greek and modern sculptures and innu- 
merable paintings. In the last department only does it 
exceed the British Museum. There we may wander 
bewildered for days and days, and then but feebly appre- 
ciate its wonders. I will try to play the guide, and, like 
that worthless and costly class, will hurry you through in 
a page or two what a volume could not exhaust. You 
too may have the privilege — and I shall commend you 
if you assume it — of refusing to follow this jabbering 
valet de place. Turn from this chapter to its less am- 
bitious fellows, whose humility preserves them from as 
complete a failure. 

Whoever will walk these rounds with me, let them 
enter the side of the quadrangle opposite the Tuileries. 
I first came on Monday. " Fermee," said the guard. I 
thought it was the passport he wished. So I drew it 
forth. " Fermee, Monsieur. C'est fermee, aujourd'hui." 
I supposed then he wished for a special permit, and told 
him I had none. " Fermee," was his sole reply. " Je 
ne comprend pas," said I, taking refuge in the usual 
bomb-proof of unintelligence. He pointed to the door 



PICTURES AND PALACES. 327 

It was closed. I certainly understood that, and remem- 
bered, if I had ever forgotten, that " fermee " meant 
" shut." Sunday is the great day for the exhibition, 
and Monday is the day of cleansing. It is sad to learn 
that not a few Puritan descendants profane the day 
of the Lord by visiting these halls. 

Coming Tuesday then we easily find admission. Toil- 
ing up many broad stairs, we enter long palatial halls, 
sumptuous with marbles, frescos, and every conceit of 
wealth and luxury. We slip along the almost glassy 
floors through several increasingly splendid rooms, the 
last of which, called the Hall of Apollo, is the most 
ornate I have seen anywhere, so resplendent is it in 
stucco, enamel, fresco, and floor. 

Out of this we enter a large square room, lined thick 
with pictures. This is the antechamber of the master- 
pieces. Not a few of them are worthy of a place among 
the elect in the adjacent hall. Look at this " Deluge '* 
by Girodet Triosa. You never heard of him before, but 
you will never forget this, his child. See that old man 
on the shoulders of his son, who, with one hand, is 
clutching the breaking branch of a withered tree that 
springs out of a cliff overhanging the boiling surge, 
while with the other he tries to keep his wife from tum- 
bling down the precipice, up which she is seeking to 
climb, while her child is pulling at her long hair to raise 
himself out of the water. The expression of horror and 
despair is awful beyond description. From the old man 
hugging with shaking knees the neck of his son, to the 
boy, one foot on the rock, striving to swing himself out 
of the swiftly rising waves by his mother's hair, there is 
one horrible look of selfishness and fear. The breaking 
limb shows how powerless is the effort, how brief the 
agony. You expect, even while you are gazing, to see 
the whole group disappear like a dreadful dream in the 
engulfing waters. 



328 PICTURES AND PALACES. 

" Clytemnestra murdering Agamemnon " is remarkable 
for its use of bloody hues. The air seems red with 
blood. Behind a red curtain which separates her and 
her victim, a candle is casting its lurid light. Its rays 
fall red upon the sleeper's face. She hesitates to ad- 
vance, while her paramour is pushing her forward. The 
disposition of light and the conflict in her soul, are pow- 
erfully managed. 

Very different from his " Deluge " is Triosa's picture of 
the burial of a damsel by a monk and her lover. The 
religious strength of the priest, the agony of the lover, 
the calm sweetness of the dead, are worthy of great ad- 
miration and love. Here, also, hang two of David's 
greatest efforts, — " Rape of the Sabine Women " and 
" Pass of Thermopylae." They are exceedingly animated, 
beautiful, unnatural, and Parisian. The naked Romans 
seize nearly naked dames, whose like nude sires and 
brothers are fighting fiercely for their rescue. Some of 
the heads and forms and postures are very fine, especially 
that in the foreground, Avhere a beautiful woman is seek- 
ing to pacify her fighting brother and lover. 

More beautiful, but not more true, is the picture of 
Leonidas preparing for battle. The handsomest of youths 
run, climb, anoint their bodies, or are otherwise seemingly 
engaged in the luxurious dalliance of the bath and the 
gymnasium. From Leonidas down, every one is a per- 
fect Adonis. No shred of clothing seems necessary for 
these men who are soon to say that the cloud of their 
enemies' arrows sufiiciently protects their eyes from the 
too dazzling sun. No weather-stained face or corrugated 
skin among these Spartan soldiers, who had been always 
in the fore-front of danger and death. The ravine, the 
positions, the persons, are alike almost wanton in volupt- 
uousness. Grim-visacred war has smoothed its wrinkled 
front even in the very crisis of the battle. How much 



PICTURES AND PALACES. 329 

better had it been for the really great artist's fame had he 
painted these rough Romans, Sabines, and Spartans, as 
he did his patron climbing the Alps, the sublimest, be- 
cause the simplest and truest picture of Napoleon. 

Turn away from these false splendors and fasten your 
eyes on this " Psyche and Cupid." How childish, artless, 
exquisite their love. Her hands are folded across her 
breast. . Her eyes are looking at you and beyond you, 
with a rare expression of meekness and sweetness, while 
he is placing upon her forehead passionless lips of love. 
Seldom has childish simplicity and youthful grace been so 
happily combined with the conscious maturity of beatific 
souls. 

But we are lingering in the vestibule. Let us pass 
into the grand hall. It is round, lofty, with its ceiling 
highly wrought in stucco and fresco. But its sides, not 
roof, draw our eyes. Raphael, Paul Veronese, Reynolds, 
Guido, and Murillo, cover these walls. Of these, three 
are chief: " The Holy Family," by Raphael ; " Marriage 
in Cana," by Paolo Veronese ; and " The Conception," by 
Murillo. Of these in reality there is but one, — the last. 
Paul of Verona is clear and vigorous, but not divine ; 
full of figures, but not full of greatness. Raphael 
has that perfect perfection which we shall see perfected 
in Florence and Rome. It is surpassing in sweetness, 
womanliness, finish. What inexpressible loveliness beams 
from that sacred face ! What venerable awe from that of 
Elizabeth ! What unconscious majesty from the Child ! 
And yet we turn away to fasten greedy eyes upon 
the Murillo beside it. The upturned eyes and half- 
opened lips of the maiden ; her rapt face, almost trans- 
figured in its divine communion ; the clouds of angels 
hovering around ; the horned moon under her floating 
feet ; the majestic sweep of her simple array, — a blue 
mantle falling over a white robe, — these give it a unity 



330 PICTURES AND PALACES. 

and divinity that no other picture I had then seen, and but 
one or two that I saw afterward, equalled. One of those 
was a picture of the Virgin, Titian's, at Venice. Her 
maiden modesty, her matronly dignity, seemingly con- 
scious of the everlasting honor that was coming upon her, 
her holy ecstasy that swallowed up these womanly senti- 
ments in the passion of spiritual love, all found fit expres- 
sion in this wondrous picture. The longer one looks the 
more he feels and sees. It reveals depths in him, no less 
than in her, and deep answers unto deep in the silent com- 
munion. Exquisitely maternal Murillos do we find else- 
where in Europe ; none so sublime as this. It is worth a 
a trip to Paris to see. Intoxicated with this draught of 
genius, we reel forward through ten long galleries, crowded 
in every inch with the works of old masters. Yet we see 
none. Here blazes a stream of Ruben's, flowing for hun- 
dreds of feet, — the gaudy apotheosis of the Louis and 
his Medici. Then comes, in the familiar juxtaposition of 
European cities, next to this royal display, the homely 
plainness of Flemish beer-houses, fish-markets, beef-stalls, 
— Rubens and his country cousins, in violent but natural 
conflict. Among the hundreds the eye lingers on but 
few. Guido's " Ecce Homo " is the consummation of 
agony and resolution ; his " St. Sebastian," the equal con- 
summation of Apollo beauty and Apollos faith. Daniel 
De Voltera's " David decapitating Goliath " is a remarka- 
ble work, in which the youthful warrior with calm, ex:- 
ultant face, has his knee upon the side of Goliath and his 
hand hold of his hair, while his sword is raised in the act 
of descending upon the prostrate giant. The beauty, 
ease, and lightning force of the conqueror are strongly 
contrasted with the brute and vanishinor strength of the 
conquered. Two Murillos shine in these galleries also. 
Not so much, however, for the ideas they embody as for 
the naturalness and richness of their scenes. They arb 
the " Birth of the Virgin " and the " Ecstasy of the 



PICTURES AND PALACES. 331 

Monk." Each, is large, and abounding in figures and 
vivacity. The babe Mary lies in the lap of the most 
motherly of nurses, as well as the most beautiful. Her 
mother, Anna, lies upon the couch, while the various 
movements of the kitchen and chamber, both of which 
it is, are going forward. 

The "Ecstasy of the Monk" is more amusing. The 
saint was expecting a visit from the abbot and other 
dignitaries, and should be providing the entertainment. 
But prayer had got the better of human duty, and he 
is floating in the air in an ecstasy, — his hands clasped, 
and eyes closed, while his face and his brown robe are 
shining in the transfiguring lustre of his soul. To pro- 
vide for his neglect, angels have been sent to prepare 
the feast. They are busy at their task. Their many- 
colored wings and enchanting countenances chime oddly 
with the lowly cell and their more lowly service. One 
is carrying a pitcher, another pounding in a mortar, 
another setting a table, another tending a pot over a 
fire, and two are picking over vegetables. The bustle 
of a kitchen is being enacted by the most gorgeous 
cherubim and seraphim. The grave old abbot and his 
guests at the opening door, give the familiarity of com- 
mon day to the otherwise too fairy-like picture. As a 
mirthful evolution of a mediaeval conceit, it is unsur- 
passed. More genius is cast away in this mixture of 
merriment and sanctity than would set up half the gallery. 

But " ferm^e " sounds through the halls, and the stal- 
wart policeman is seen driving the spectators and copy- 
ists like a flock of sheep before his baton-like staff. 
Weary with looking and standing, we hear the word as 
gladly to-day as we did contrariwise yesterday, and leave 
the silent gallery of stars that never set, for the life 
and roar without. The Louvre is seen, not studied. For 
that, artists and your own eyes must be your guide. 



332 PICTURES AND PALACES. 



THE LUXEMBOURG GALLERY. 

As we are attent upon pictures, let us visit the other 
public collection, which, though smaller, is hardly less 
choice than that of the Louvre. It is across the Seine, 
beyond the Sorbonne, near the Pantheon, whose dome 
you remember beholding from the Arc de Triomphe, 
crowning the hill at the south-western extremity of the 
city. We pass, in going thither, many noticeable spots : 
the Hotel de Ville, its open square the scene of many a 
bloody conflict, itself the scene of many a brilliant ban- 
quet ; the Hotel Dieu, — beautiful name for a hospital ; 
many museums of science, — not the least in horror being 
that of Dupuytreu. What dreadful evidence it gives of 
the sin of Adam, which " brought death into the world 
and all our woe." These shelves of deformed children 
from a month upwards ; twisted skeletons, swollen tumors ; 
caries of bone that look like hideous masses of coral ; mon- 
strous heads, hearts, livers ; men whose heads have grown 
beneath their shoulders ; everything awful, nothing lovely. 
Such is sin in the body ; how much more hideous its 
revelations in the soul. What would a museum be that 
collected those monstrosities ? Why did not Hawthorne 
fill such a gallery? His imagination was equal to the 
task, and his nature, in a sense, would have enjoyed it. 
Its more fearful malformations would make every eye 
that sees them shudder to eternity. 

Next comes the College of Sorbonne, — a square 
quadrangle, with cold stone walls and pavements, with- 
out a shrub or a blade of grass, but green and rich in 
memories of its Calvin, Richelieu, and others, — a mighty 
host ; hard bound often by error, and infuriated with the 
spirit of persecution, yet also often faithful as scholars, 
and not utterly useless as saints. 

Intolerance naturally leads to revolts, first spiritual. 



PICTURES AND PALACES. 333 

then political, and so by a step we are led to the tomb 
of Pascal, and the empty sarcophagi of Voltaire, Rousseau, 
and Mirabeau. Pascal lies, as we have said before, in 
the Church of St. Etienne du Mont, —r ugly without, but 
all beautiful within. A turgid inscription that must vex 
his Flaxman brain below, even in its ashes, is concluded 
by a petition to the reader to pray for the repose of his 
soul, — a request that must make his soul even more 
indignant than his taste. A recusant relative paid this 
unworthy tribute to his memory. Rollin and Racine 
sleep beside him. 

Voltaire, Rousseau, Mirabeau, Marat, — how that climax 
mounts to its bloody summit ! These all were entombed 
in the stately Pantheon, with which Pascal's church is 
connected, as the abbey chapel with its cathedral. The 
cenotaphs of the first two are shown. None of them lie 
here. All were removed secretly, except Marat, who 
was taken out by the authorities and cast into the com- 
mon sewer. Papacy yet binds the people, and bloodier 
Marats may precede its extermination. 

But the gallery of the Luxembourg will be closed if 
we thus loiter. It is but a few steps thither. Descend 
the hill where this St. Peter's of Paris rises, and enter 
an ill-shaped mass of stone standing in a mechanical 
park. More works of the modern masters shine here 
Hian in the Louvre. Rosa Bonheur, De La Roche, Ary 
Scheffer adorn this gallery. Rosa Bonheur has two pict- 
ures, — " Ploughing " and " Loading Hay." They are 
superb in animal life, but less grand in idea and landscape. 
The " Fall of Rome " is a rich but truthful story of wealth, 
luxury, wantonness, and woe. Two scowling Catos look 
upon the voluptuous scene and see the fall of their city 
in this forerunning, and more direful fall of its virtue and 
honor. " The Night before Execution " is an agonizing 
illustration of the days of the guillotine. The sullen 
despair, the maniac horror, the idiotic content, the uncon- 



334 PICTURES AND PALACES. 

scious child, the sufferer surprised by sleep, thrill the 
heart with their pathos and power. De La Roche has 
two expressive pictures, — the " Children in the Tower '* 
and the " Death of Queen Elizabeth." The first is very- 
touching, the last stiff and hard. Ary Scheffer con- 
cludes the gallery and the paintings of Paris with his 
matchless " Temptation." No such Christ, no such Satan 
glow on another canvas in the world. The faded wall 
of the refectory of Milan gives broken shadows of an 
equal, not superior Lord. This is the living ideal. Pho- 
tographs make its aspect familiar ; they cannot its ma- 
jestic life. The devil, in the stress of the hour, with a 
consciousness of weakness and of impending defeat, has 
his face full of mingled agony, shame, and terror. Christ 
in his robe of white, tinted with the ruddy dawn of the 
new heavens he was bringing upon the new earth, looks 
calmly upon him in the self-assurance, not alone of vic- 
tory, but of not even a conflict. There is a sense of 
sovereignty in that quiet eye and manner before which 
the insulting devil quails in pain. 

Having touched the height of truth and of art we 
may well drop the veil. Not the unreal beauty of Mu- 
rillo's " Conception," but the sublime triumph of the Son 
of God reigns sovereign in the memory. The German 
not the Spaniard, the Protestant not the Papist, has at- 
tained the highest human expression of the inexpressible. 

THE GOBELIN TAPESTRIES 

deserve a place in a chapter on pictures, for they are 
works of genius done in wpol. As we are not far froni 
their studio let us turn in hither. Descend the hill, 
away from the Jardin des Plantes, which is near at hand, 
and plunge into the filthiest, poorest, and most dangerous 
part of Paris. Beggars, vagabonds, wretches of every 
grade of misery throng the dirty lanes, along whose sides 



PICTURES AND PALACES. 335 

gutters of black filth slowly flow. The little Church of 
St. Medard — the pauper's cathedral — thrusts its sickly 
front among like pale and dirty haunts of vice and want. 
Around and within it, the Calvinistic battle was fought 
with bloody issue. More exciting convulsions of a later 
age, like an epidemic, raged within its walls. Near it is 
the factory. It was established here because of some 
fancied coloring virtue in the waters. It has since im- 
parted its color to them, — the black streams of the streets 
having a connection with their overflow. 

Two kinds of weaving are proceeding here, — that 
from the front, in which the weaver sees his work, and 
that from behind, where he beholds only the bit of copy 
hung before his eyes. The last is the smoother, and 
is the mode adopted in the copying of portraits and pict- 
ures into wool. Here are remarkable portraits of the 
Emperor and Empress, that were four years in weaving ; 
copies of Raphael's " Transfiguration," and other pictures 
of fame. The eye can hardly detect their material, so 
perfect is the imitation. The workman patiently thrusts 
his threads back and forward, never knowing the whole 
design of the tapestry, being required to know only his 
tiny portion. When the score of men, after years of toil, 
have patiently wrought their task, the whole is unrolled, 
a magnificent composition in color, material, design, and 
execution. 

How strikingly, thought I to myself, does this illus- 
trate the providence of God. Each in his lot and place 
sits patiently day by day and weaves the web of provi- 
dence. He knows not its entire design, hardly his own 
relation to it. But he weaves his soul into his appointed 
place, according to the pattern shown him in the Mount 
of believing vision ; obeying humbly but implicitly the 
orders of the Chief Master, communicated through His 
Word and Spirit, and lo ! when the web of humanity is 
unrolled, whose splendor shall dazzle the universe, in it, 



336 PICTURES AND PALACES. 

shiuing above the brightness of the sun, will beam his 
once seemingly trivial contribution. 

How beautiless too the side upon which he is toil- 
ing ; a coarse gray fabric, with colored threads hanging 
loosely between the interstices. Nothing more plain and 
paltry. Turn to the unseen side, and landscapes, palaces, 
kings and queens, every attraction in man, or art, or 
nature, are glowing there. So our poor earthly life, a 
coarse fabric of uniform darkness and cheapness, as most 
of it is, shot through with occasional filaments of discon- 
nected color, — the least harmonious and lovely of things, 
— seen from the finished and heavenly side, is beautiful 
as 4he face of God, whose image and likeness it is, and 
which the counsels of His grace have caused to be woven. 
The Gobelin tapestries preach practical sermons on their 
costly text. If we hear and heed we shall find them full 
of admonition, encouragement, hope. Though they dwell 
only in king's palaces, they will teach us how to possess 
tapestries of our own weaving infinitely and eternally 
superior. 

The paintings in oil have been rightly concluded with 

those in wool. The Louvre and the Gobelins are 

twins. Each shows that no material is too poor for the 

service of genius ; that colors of every hue and richness 

dwell in the dyer's vat as well as on the artist's pallet ; 

that 

" There is no great and no small 
To the soul that maketh all; " 

and, last and best, that all duties performed in faith and 
humbleness lead to eternal fame. These sons of earth, 
each patiently working among his pigments, his muddy 
clay, his threads of wool, by their triumph teach every 
son of earth that like service in his sphere will assure 
him like rewards. Here, as everywhere, the eternal law 
shines forth, glittering on the magnificent front of the 
^ palace no more brightly than over the lowly portal of 
the workshop : — 



^PICTURES AND PALACES, 337 

" The path of duty is the wajr to gloiy ; 
He that walks it, only thirsting 
For the right, and learns to deaden 
Love of self, before his journey closes, 
He shall find the stubborn thistle bursting 
Into glossy purples, which outredden 
All voluptuous garden roses." 

THE PALACES. 

But let US turn to the palaces that still house a ghostly 
royalty, supported by most vital arms. 

Among the foolish curiosities that possess a democratic 
Yankee is the desire to see how kings live. Some laugh 
at us because we peep into these luxurious spots with 
permission craved of their most gracious majesties. But 
the curiosity is not so unphilosophical as it might seem. 
In our backwoods' barbarity we have heard that there are 
persons in the centres of civilization who are considered 
marvellously above their fellows ; who are as nearly 
worshipped as it is possible for man to be in a Christian 
land. One is properly desirous to see this highest de- 
velopment of humanity, — a development that is con- 
sistent with Darwin's theory in that it is only accom- 
plished by the degradation, if not extirpation, of myriads 
of the same race. The extraordinary big bug must live, 
though at the sacrifice of its innumerable microscopic 
kindred. As a student of this new philosophy, one 
properly seeks only for these specimens of his race when 
he comes into the country where they flourish, and if he 
cannot see the lions, the next best thing is to see their 
dens. I have not yet been honored with a cat's privilege. 
It is said that she can look upon a king. That refers 
probably to a monarchical cat. They are doubtless, and 
properly, held in higher honor than a democratic man. I 
cannot say that I have tried very hard to get a glimpse 
of their majesties, but I have been to some foolish trouble 
and expense to see their hiding-places. These are seats 
of historic interest, not alone because certain men with 
22 



338 PICTURES AND PALACES.^ 

especial titles have dwelt there, but because these men 
were the depositaries, rightly or wrongly, of national 
power. Napoleon, with a million of armed men at his 
call, represents the million, and the people who willingly 
or otherwise recognize them as their representatives. 

But reasons for feelings are not what you wish. The 
feelings all recognize. Let us gratify them, and say 
nothing as to their relation to those seemingly opposite 
ones, which abide permanently in us. I have seen five 
of the places which Napoleon calls his own, and where at 
various seasons of the year, " uneasy lies the head that 
wears the crown." They are enough to give one quite 
an idea of the grandeur that hedges in a king. 

THE TUILERIES. 

One palace is very like another, and all palaces very 
like other houses. As Napoleon's tomb is only a splen- 
did polished coffin of stone, but little larger than the 
wooden box that contains his ashes, so a royal palace is 
only a larger number of larger apartments than ordinary 
mortals occupy. Ascend the marble staircase, wide, lofty, 
stately. Don't shudder at your nearness to royalty. 
You are not the first of the canaille that has rushed up 
them, American fashion. There was a time when such 
blood as yours would have stained the marble your boots 
stand on, through all thicknesses of flesh and flax and 
leather. When the Bourbons swelled up and down these 
steps, twenty millions as good as they would have defiled 
them by their touch. But one day these twenty mil- 
lions walked up them, and ever since they have been 
common and unclean. Every ruler that has since trod- 
den them, has at one time in his history had his feet sore 
with wanderings in exile. Napoleon, Louis XVIIL, 
Charles X., Louis Philippe, and the present autocrat: 
they have all been on your level. You can freely mount 
to theirs. You walk through some eight or ten lofty and 



PICTURES AND PALACES. 339 

spacious rooms, adorned with hangings, chandeliers, paint- 
ings, and statuary ; stopping to look at these chairs away 
in a gallery twice as high as the pulpit, opposite the 
altar, where the Emperor and wife listen to the service, 
or he talks with himself on less humiliating and saving 
themes. On the side of the throne-room, under a canopy 
of crimson velvet, covered with gold bees, are two com- 
mon square arm-chairs, covered with velvet, and the let- 
ter " N " wrought into the back. Here he receives the 
worship of his officials. Like thrones are found at other 
palaces. So that they are at hand, if occasion calls for 
them, at any of their homes. This, the first Emperor is 
said to have sat in, though why it was so carefully pre- 
served by the Bourbons in their fifteen years' sway, and 
the Orleans in theirs, we are not informed. 

VERSAILLES. 

But we must get out of Paris, if we would see royalty 
in all its glory. Versailles and Fontainebleau are, and 
have long been, its chosen seats. The word " long " 
does not mean long in a Chinese or an English sense. 
Windsor has been a royal seat for eight hundred years 
at least. No palace, occupied as such in France, is more 
than three hundred years old. The older ones, some of 
^hich go back to the days of Julian, are appropriated to 
other uses. It is no slight example of the changeable- 
ness of the people. Fontainebleau has some rooms five 
hundred years old, but its main history is only three. 

Versailles is nearest, and we will go there first. Pro- 
nounce it " Versaiyee." The letter 1 is dropped when- 
ever it can be, by a Parisian, and its vacancy made up 
by a long drawl on the antecedent vowel with a slight 
nasal twang infecting, and, to us, of course, improving its 
quality. Get on top of the railroad car. Here are 
covered seats that give you a fine view of the country, 
with a large amount of fresh and very active air mixed 



340 PICTURES AND PALACES. 

up with it. We ride twelve miles, passing St. Cloud, — ■ 
pronounced a la Chinese, " Saangg Cloo." It is hidden 
from our sight in a large park. A half an hour and we 
are at Versailles. It is built on three sides of a quad- 
rangle, the fourth side being open to the street. A 
large, decayed town hugs its walls and gardens. It 
looks immense but not lofty, and hence not grand. The 
row of buildings on either side were occupied in the 
days of Louis by the officers of State. Statues of 
some of these statesmen line the court. Opposite the 
gate, and in front of you, is the main building, — the seat 
of more pride and sin than was centred in any other 
spot for the hundred years that passed from the time 
when Louis the Great moved there, to that when his son 
left it for the judgment-seat of God, and his son's son 
left it for the judgment-seat of an avenging people, the 
representatives of the same God. On its centre is the 
clock which was stopped when the King died, and so in 
fact never went at all. It is going now as quietly as 
any other old clock. Kings have ceased to die in France, 
because they have ceased to live. Below it, is a little 
balcony that issues from the chamber of Louis XIV., 
and on which a courtier ran the night of his death, break- 
ing a wand and crying "Ze Roi est mort" and taking up 
another, waved it, exclaiming, " Vive le Roi." The court 
nearest this group of buildings was originally separated 
from the rest, and only royal carriages were allowed to 
enter it. Plebeian feet tread its pavements with thought- 
less impudence to-day. One has an idea from the prom- 
inence which this place fills in modern history that it 
has existed for a thousand years, and yet only two kings 
have lived in it. Occupied first in 1680, it was dis- 
mantled and left in a ruinous state in 1790, and no 
monarch since has made it a permanent abode. It is 
now a gallery of French glory, — a bewildering map of 
paintings. Miles of canvas cover its walls. This is 



PICTURES AND PALACES. 341 

truth, not extravagance. The pictorial history of France 
is set forth with astonishing fulness of paint. Portraits 
of her famous men, and streets of statues, throng every 
part of the building. The later history of France is 
very fully detailed. Even the battles of Alma, Sevasto- 
pol, Solferino, and Margenta, are spread out here. Mex- 
ico is to go up also, if the right materials for self- 
glorification can be won from that invasion. 

One can but notice how bloody is the whole affair. 
The air almost smells of it. Nearly every picture is a 
battle. Vernet, their most popular painter, dips his brush 
in blood. Some of his pictures are fine ; we should say 
grand, were it not for their moral nature, or their lack 
of moral nature. His horses are full of fire. He main- 
tains well the equipoise of fever and repose, in his cool 
officers and fighting soldiers, dying men, trampled women, 
and sleeping children. But the spirit is awful, and the 
intent more so. For it is not "to show the triumph of 
justice and liberty through such fearful conflicts, but 
simply and solely French glory. Here are the French 
set forth by Vernet attacking the Italians in their en- 
trenchments before Rome, when they went out profess- 
edly to aid these Italians against the Papal tyranny. 

A nation fed on blood, because it is blood, can never 
be wholly great. I doubt if this be a characteristic of 
this people. From what I can see and learn, — obscure 
as must be ray information, through the dumbness that 
ignorance of the language imposes, — I am sure that the 
people of France, like all other people, do not love'war. 
These pictures are put here by their false rulers, to create 
a love for war, so that the life of a soldier may be popu- 
lar, and soldiers may themselves be reverenced, and the 
throne thus stand the more secure. These Napoleons, 
more than all other sovereigns, cultivate this fever. For 
by it, and it alone, they have risen and flourished. A 
proof of the real feelings of the people occurred while 



342 PICTURES AND PALACES. 

we were sauntering through the palace. One of the 
party stopped to rest and chat with one of the officers. 
The officer immediately began to talk about our war, how 
cruel it was, and bloody. " How could people kill each 
other so " ? The American retorted, " Why in the world 
do you complain of war and bloodshed ? See these walls, 
they are all war, all blood." The quick-witted French- 
man saw the point instantly, and courteously subsided. 

After spending weary hours in simply walking past 
the false and gory panorama of the history of France, 
we betake ourselves to the gardens. Like expense, ele- 
gance, and falsehood abound here, — though Nature is not 
so utterly cheated as she is inside the walls. The gardens 
have a prim and formal cut, their immensity making their 
unnaturalness endurable. 

K the inside of the palace is indescribable, much more 
are its grounds. Conceive of a paterre, a quarter of a 
mile wide, with a lake pond in its centre, set round with 
statues, with steps descending to another and wider 
area, a road lined with statues winding on its circum- 
ference, and fountains and statues in its centre, — beyond 
this, a green walk three hundred feet or more in width, 
and a mile long, straight and smooth and gently sloping 
from you. Its sides are lined with the carefully trimmed 
edge of a thick forest that stands behind ; and gigantic 
statues glisten beneath them. At its end another fountain, 
and beyond that a straight canal, a hundred of feet wide, 
a mile and a third in length, crossed at right angles 
by another of almost equal size, with vast pastures and 
woods lost in the horizon beyond ; this is the view which 
you have from the front of the palace. On either 
hand are like statues, fountains, straight paths, trees cut 
into pyramids, obelisks, cones, and even summer-houses. 
The whole scene is superb, if unnatural. The English 
manage these things much better. Hence her monarchy 
has stood much longer. Yet the very perfection of the 



PICTURES AND PALACES. 343 

falsehood almost compels your admiration. Perhaps I 
am wrong. It is not all false. The artificial arrange- 
ments are modified by the luxuriance of Nature, and one 
can sit on the garden steps and admire the scenes so 
carefully and splendidly arrayed before him. 
Within the grounds is the palace called 

LE GRAND TRIANON. 

It was built for Madame de Maintenon, and was a 
favorite residence of the Bourbons, Louis Philippe, 
and Napoleon the First. It is only one story high and 
one room wide, but many rooms long. Here is a bath, 
where the grand Louis used to wash his sacred little 
body in wine. His inward lavations in the same liquor 
were more frequent and less beneficial. There is the 
bedroom fitted up for Victoria by Louis Philippe, but 
never occupied. The private apartments of Napoleon 
and Josephine are small and neat, and look as if, had 
he been a Washington, or she a Martha Washington, 
they could have lived all their days there, happy and 
prosperous. But am^bition invaded their hearts, and he 
drove her forth from this paradise, and then was com- 
pelled to follow her into a drearier exile. So did Louis 
Philippe, from like false ambition, meet a like deserved 
fall. In due time, if death does not step in, a like fate 
will overtake their equally ambitious and equally false- 
hearted successor. 

In the stables adjoining are the state coaches, covered 
with gold, — huge, tasteless, cumbrous concerns, with 
crowns and other insignia stuck profusely over them. 
Napoleon's coach when First Consul, is the most modest 
of them all. The most pompous was made for Charles X., 
who forgot to order it out when he scampered from the 
kingdom. The present Emperor used it at his corona- 
tion. I wonder if he will at his decoronation. Seven of 
these carriages are housed here. The people do not rever- 



344 PICTURES AND PALACES. 

ence these Juggernaut cars as they used to, and so they 
are seldom seen in the streets of Paris. The astute 
Emperor drives his buggy and bays alone. 

Out into the fresh air and glowing gardens let us 
walk, through these too straight but very beautiful forest 
streets, so wide, so high, so grand. A mile or two leads 
us to the gates. The top of an American horse-car, the 
only one running from Paris, makes us feel at home, and 
still not at home. Down the grand avenue, lined with 
high, trimmed trees, for two or three miles, we ride, with 
the death-chamber of Louis and the deregalized clock 
fronting us, when a turn in the road shuts the palace of 
Versailles forever from the eyes. We parted willingly, 
at least so far as 1 was concerned, and probably it did 
not object to have a pair of irreverent eyes taken from 
it, that saw its spots more than its glories. It is a mon- 
ument of the height of human folly and sin. Its cham- 
bers were full of pride, of wantonness, of immeasurable 
corruption. It stands a memorial of the truth of Script- 
ure, "Pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty 
spirit before a fall." 

FONTAINEBLEAU 

is forty miles south of Paris, in a great forest, sixty miles 
in circuit. Five hours' ride through it on a hot day^ gave 
us quite as much of a taste of it as we craved. Rocking 
rocks, dripping rocks, and other slight rariations of the 
natural scenery of a piece of woods, are used by the 
hackmen to squeeze francs out of inexperienced travel- 
lers. But a part of one's education from his boyhood, 
whether of books or sights, is to know that much is not 
worth knowing, and this important branch is not the least 
expensive. A few great trees of oak and beech and 
some forest views keep the balance of good and evil well 
poised. 



PICTURES AND PALACES. Ub 

The palace is an irregular pile, without any order that 
I could detect in several hours' careful study. It is full 
of historic interest. Charles the Fifth, and other ancient 
dignitaries, entered its walls before this little company of 
three Americans, a doctor and two ministers, honored it 
with their presence. Its chief court is where Napoleon 
bade adieu to his soldiers after Waterloo. The table on 
which he signed his abdication is shown you, in the room 
where it then stood. It is a little, round, red stand, as 
unpretentious as he was at the beginning and end of his 
days. We are led through the usual bewilderment of 
rooms, painted ceilings, walls, statues, and pictures, re- 
lieved in this case by a sight of the living rooms, as they 
used to say in New England, just left by the Emperor 
and Empress, carpets down and furniture exposed. Some 
are cozy, some even dingy, and looking as if much used, 
especially the toilet-chamber of the Empress, which is 
very small and not very stylish. Their sleeping cham- 
bers are lofty and large, — his bed covered with a dark 
green, hers with an old-fashioned and almost dirty looking 
wrought satin, coverlid. In his room was a fine chande- 
lier of rock crystal. So you know how these folks sleep. 
No worse, no better now, than when she was but an 
Irish Consul's daughter and he a Dutch Admiral's son. 
It did seem a little degrading, I confess, for such ultra 
Democrats as we to be gazing half-rcspectfuUy at a 
despot's bathing-room, study, sitting-room, and bed. But 
curiosity gets the better of principle in Eve's children 
sometimes, as it did in her. 

Outside of the palace is the most beautiful spot I have 
seen in France. The grounds are partly angularized 
and partly Anglicanized. One portion is an immense 
Italian affair, square pond, square trees, and almost square 
flowers. A canal, about a mile in length, surrounded 
with trees un trimmed, though in a straight line, is on 
the left of this Italian rectangularity. On its right is a 
delightful English park, and large irregular pond, full of 



346 PICTURES AND PALACES. 

irregular carp, who crowd on each other in a very irreg- 
ular manner, jump out of water, and almost scream like 
pigs in their greediness to get a bit of bread which 
amused spectators throw them. 

Though they have no teeth to eat the corn-cake, 
they are not willing, like the like bald pets of our ex- 
tinct oppression, to let the corn-cake be. Loaves of old 
bread are tossed into the water, which they spring at and 
turn over and over in their abortive efforts to devour. 
The tough loaf crumbles under the action of the water, 
and so at last each aged carp gets a nibble, while his son 
or aspiring grandson secures the last and largest portion. 
For a more than apish caricature on man, commend me 
to the gray-headed carp of Fontainebleau. 

We could linger here for hours, and muse and moral- 
ize on the life that has sailed haughtily down these 
avenues and through these halls, fluttered and fled. One 
need not go to Rome nor Egypt to see the lessons Divine 
righteousness teaches to men. No rulers were so openly 
voluptuous as the French. The finest of these buildings 
was built by a king for his mistress. So was it at Ver- 
sailles. 

The Pantheon was built by Louis XV., under the in- 
fluence of the Duchess de Pompadour, The naked form 
of Diana of Poitiers, Henry IL put in the window of 
his chapel at Vincennes. The paramour of Henry IV. 
had like publicity of honor, which is shame. No wonder 
that God gave such blood to be licked by the dogs of 
Paris, as he did that of the house of Ahab in an ancient 
Paris. One has no tears to shed over the fate of the 
Bourbons. A sterner blood, but as impure, as proud, 
and more despotic, has supplanted it. It too shall follow 
that which it has supplanted to a tearless grave. Had this 
people real religion, real liberty from such rulers would 
soon follow. 

But I am tired of kings and palaces, if you are not. 
To-morrow for the Rhine. 



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XX. 



EXTRAIT DE PARIS. 




N the Bois de Boulogne is a crumbling little 
pillar which tells us that, about five hun- 
dred years ago, a troubadour by the name of 
Catalan was passing through this forest to the royal 
court, and, boasting to some of the woodsmen that he 
was bearing to the king a treasure of great value, they 
killed and spoiled him, when, lo ! his treasure consisted 
of a few vials of precious perfumes. La Pre Catalan, 
the meadow of Catalan, with its gardens, cafes, rustic 
theatre, and musical promenades, keeps the character of 
the gay troubadour alive much better than the gray old 
stone. Into that or kindred forms most of the extraor- 
dinary wealth of Paris would still be condensed. It 
is largely a city of richest social, sensuous, earthly per- 
ftimes. One of the murderers of the singer was detected 
by using the exquisite volatile. I fear no such fragrance 
in this will prove that it is imbued with the spirit of the 
place. It may show thereby its innocence ; for it is 
probably as difficult to obtain this unction sinlessly as it 
was that. 

" Good Americans, when they die, go to Paris." This 
witty conceit is attributed to the keen-eyed Emerson. 
If his, it is well to see what a Pantheist's idea is of good 
Americans, or the home they anticipate. It cannot be 
worse than that of good or bad Pantheists, who, if he 
be their true exponent, anticipate the utter loss of inde- 



348 EXTRAIT DE PARIS. 

pendent coascious being. This is the Gaudama and 
Brahamistic perfection to which the most advanced of 
all the Jieresiarchs of rationalism has attained. Truly, 
we can say there is nothing new under the sun, when 
the ultimate point of modern antichristian faith touches 
the creeds of heathen India, solidified thousands of years 
ago into forms of false philosophy and falser faith. 
Emerson sets forth his idea of the future state of man, 
body and soul, in good Hindoo English, in many lines 
of perfect beauty. This couplet conveys his idea as well 
as any, written, too, — think of it ! — in one of the most 
tender and exquisite threnodies in any language, a lam- 
entation over the death of his son, — 

" House and tenant go to the ground, 
Lost in God, in Godhead found." 

I am free to say a Parisian heaven is superior to a 
Pantheon heaven, and I still prefer to take my chance 
among the good Americans, if I can only get among 
them, than with these resolvers of man, and of God him- 
self, into intangible, invisible, unconscious somethings or 
nothings, practically the latter. Give me the Catalan 
vial, full of an essence apprehensible by but one, and 
that the lowest of the senses, to that which is utterly 
unapprehensible by any sense, spiritual or material, and 
so, both as vial and as odor, is as though it were not and 
had never been. But, wrong as Emerson is in these 
highest conclusions, he is still one of the clearest-eyed of 
living or dead men in lower matters ; and this chance re- 
mark is not without point. 

Many good Americans look upon heaven purely as a 
place of enjoyment. Such preeminently is Paris. Er- 
roneously interpreting Scripture, they say rest from toil 
means play ; singing God's praises is a ceaseless prom- 
enade concert ; wandering by the banks of the river of 
life is a picnic ; seated on a throne with crown and 
sceptre is becoming a Sardanapalus ; walking the streets 



EXTRAIT DE PARIS. 349 

of the golden city is luxurious feasting of eye and ear 
and tongue on the splendors and viands of the metropolis 
of the universe. They even eliminate heaven of special 
affections, making it in that respect too, indiscriminate, 
powerless, Platonic, and Parisian. Of such gross inter- 
preters of the Divine promises, the reflection of Emerson 
is true. Paris is the heaven they dream about and 
preach about. Superficial Paris, that which strikes the 
eye, is clean, tasteful, luxurious, virtuous, though sen- 

-Biious ; purely and entirely of the earth, earthy. That 
is far from the spirituality which ever pervades the Word 
of God. Its descriptions show that the state is always 
in subordination to the soul of man and the Spirit of God. 
This makes a wide distinction between Paris and the 
New Jerusalem, which we do well not to confound. 

But I did not mean to preach a sermon, though how 
a minister can avoid it, and whether or no he ought to 
avoid it, are questions difficult to answer. 

Let me give you a drop or two of the essence into 

i?which an experience of a month resolves itself. 

HOMES. 

I cannot begin such a chat better than by inviting you 
to come and sit with me in this garret parlor. Sky par- 
lor is a jest in America, but a reality in Paris. Here 
we are, in the fifth story of a marble house, above the 
eaves, and entirely within the roof, and still in as finely 
furnished apartments as you will find in many stone 
fronts in Western cities. Piano, stuffed chairs, sofa, heavy 
lace curtains, marble-top tables, marble clocks, — all the 
paraphernalia of a handsome parlor in a garret. Near 
by are our attic dining-room, kitchen, parlor-chamber, 
and other bedrooms. Flower-pots, full of beauty and 
fragrance, stand on the balcony, to which door-windows 
easily admit you. One does not live so high up in the 



350 EXTRAIT BE PARIS. 

world for nothing ; though I am thus favored through the 
courtesy of Dr. Gage, one of those American dentists 
that have given us so high a reputation in thut pro- 
fession in Europe. He had engaged the rooms for 
another party, and they not arriving, I was invited, with 
a mutual friend, to make them my head-quarters for what 
few days I ^sls to remain here. The rent of such ac- 
commodations is not less than $400 a year : very good 
for a garret. 

Thereby hangs life in Paris. It is, as you have 
often heard, floor life. Here is a handsome white stone 
building, solid stone, backwall and all ; there is no ve- 
neering even there. It has a wide front, with an entrance 
as big as a church door in its centre. This door opens 
into a court sometimes, sometimes only into a spacious 
entry. Near it live a man and wife, whose business it 
is to take care of the building, let it, clean it, tend door, 
receive letters, etc. The floors are let to families or in- 
dividuals, according to circumstances. Each floor has, or 
may have, a bonne, or female servant, who will take care 
of your rooms, get what meals you wish, charging you 
the exact expense of getting them, even to the charcoal. 
There are, of course, slight alterations from this. You 
can have your room and board in a family, paying only 
for the meals you take ; or, if one has his family, he lives 
in his own way, as at home, — only it is horizontal life, 
not, as in our cities, perpendicular. 

It is a question which is the better. There is less 
going up-stairs, even to these attic elegancies. When on 
your floor, your climbing is all over. There is as much 
seclusion as in a brick block. You may, on going down, 
see your neighbor on the stairs, but it is as if you saw 
him on adjoining doorsteps. There is thus all the igno- 
rance and indqfpendence of your neighbors, which city 
people so intensely crave. 



EXTRAIT DE PARIS. 351 



THE STORES. 

But we have sat here long enough. Suppose we walk 
out and see the stores. Everybody enjoys the attractions 
of city stores. But nobody sees such taste and brilliancy 
in that department out of Paris. Here the French genius 
shines forth. English, American, German, are all rude 
and barbarous in the art of putting things beside these 
modern Greeks. Once in a while a Broadway grocer or 
mercer arrays costly goods in a costly way ; but the 
poorest stores here, in the most obscure streets, are set 
off with peculiar beauty. Look at that cheap grocer's 
window. Nothing there but soap, raisins, sugar, coffee, -^ 
ordinary wares ; but their arrangement makes them ap- 
pear like a costly picture. You enjoy looking at them 
even more than you would eating them. How nicely 
the meats in the provision market are set forth ! Most 
such places in America are dirty enough to make every 
spectator a vegetarian. Here, so clean, artistic, and en- 
ticing is their array, that they would seduce Mr. Martin 
from his vegetarianism if he would row his wherry across 
the Atlantic on a quart of milk and a peck of apples, 
though milk being an animal production, I presume he 
never used it, even in infancy. But the vegetable stalls 
would save him, for no flower-garden surpasses these 
four-feet squares of inclined tables in attractiveness. So 
is it in everything. The wood and coal dealers have 
little stores on the streets, and their bits of coal and 
wood are arranged as artistically as though they were 
their aristocratic and polished kindred, the diamond and 
mahogany. 

The dry-goods houses are particularly fine. Not only 
the grand, but the petite establishments glow with grace- 
ful combinations. You are surprised to see the value 
affixed to such an array. I have seen windows full of 



852 EXTRAIT DE PARIS. 

shilling goods that looked fine enough for a wedding. 
* Where the silks are arrayed the elegance is more com- 
plete, though hardly more alluring. Shopping in Paris is 
a luxury to the eye, whatever it may be to the pocket, and 
the least trifle seems to be not only useful but comely. 
The fine arts are set forth in a franc cap, and shine in a 
tallow candle. There is a great lesson in this ; for there 
is a divine law of beauty as well as of utility, and our 
French brethren can teach its demands and delights in 
these commonest affairs of life. 

It shows itself also in their speech and ways. How 
unconsciously graceful ! " Polite " is not a forced word 
with them, as it often is with us and our English breth- 
ren. It is spontaneous. " Merci," " Thank you," is on 
their lips all the time. When you ask for anything, 
when you pay, it sets off both ends of the bargain. So 
"Monsieur" and " Madame " always garnish their address, 
whether to inferiors or superiors. 

A LA CARTE. 

But you are hungry, and one comes to Paris to eat. 
This same quality shows itself here also. Grace in com- 
binations of food is only the same law working in another 
of the senses, — the palate. The awkwardness of other 
nations is seen nowhere more than in this. An Ameri- 
can restaurant, however stylish, is unfascinating. The 
daily exchange of dinners at home for dinners there by 
our merchants is the greatest of social sacrifices, or would 
be but that Irish girls get up the house-dinners, who are 
as incapable of cooking as of Protestantism. English 
restaurants are as poor as American. But one looks 
forward to the dinner-hour here at these saloons, not 
with a mere hungry impulse, but with an expectation of 
enjoyment, as if going to listen to agreeable music ; and 
yet the bill of fare may be limited to the proper priestly 
restraint. 



EXTRAIT DE PARIS. 353 

In Paris you can live finely and cheaply at the same 
time. Breakfast is served from eleven to two at Palais 
Royal, so we will call it dinner, and enter one of these 
cafes again. Our last visit was at evening ; this shall 
be in the more trying light of mid-day. How bright, high, 
airy, cheerful, and, above all, clean, — how clean ! — clean 
napkin, spotless white plates, white-aproned gargons, — 
the first quality of a dinner is here. A little plate of 
butter and radishes is set before you, a bottle of wine, 
which you can change for a cup of tea, chocolate, or coffee 
(these latter are exquisite, which I cannot say of the 
wine) ; two dishes, such as beefsteak and potatoes and 
ham and eggs ; all the bread you can eat, — a yard, if 
you will (that 's the form it takes here) ; with a dessert 
of strawberries, cherries, or what you please ; and all 
this for twenty-five cents, in a royal palace, if your 
democracy can endure that, even now the residence of 
Prince Jerome. That will do for cheapness. But if you 
will have a nice supper, at a lower rate, come to this 
" Creraerie Madeleine," close to the magnificent church 
at the corner of Rue Royale and Faubourg St. Honor^, 
one of the most aristocratic corners in the city, call for a 
bowl of riz a la cremCy a most delicious dish of rice and 
milk, — prepared how I know not, like a pudding but 
not one, — price, four sous; tea or coffee or chocolate 
are served with it, each excellent, and a large bowl of 
each, for the same price, and bread and butter a sou each. 
As much as you can eat of the best you get for ten 
cents. More than once, with clergymen, physicians, and 
others, I have "gone the whole nine cents " in that satis- 
factory place and way. 

If, however, you disdain these humble quarters, where 
fine-dressed gentlemen and blue-bloused gentlemen daily 
throng, let us go to the grand cafes. With some American 
friends, I dined at the first of these establishments, the 
Trois Freres Provin9aux, — velvet chairs, velvet-covered 
23 



354 EXTRAIT DE PARIS. 

bill of fare, everything " superb." We ordered roast beef, 
and it was an hour and a quarter before it was set upon 
the table. But it was a new revelation of the familiar 
idea of roast beef, and new creations require time. One 
of the party asked for a piece of lamb. They served 
up nothing short of a quarter. A dinner there easily 
costs ten, and even twenty dollars. But it is worth the 
money in the same sense that furs, gloves, jewelry, and 
many ornaments of parlor and dress are worth their price. 
A song of Jenny Lind is worth all it costs, and so may a 
dinner at the Trois Fr^res Provingaux. 

One peculiarity of Paris eating-houses deserves men- 
tion. They are of several sorts : the Bouillon, or Beef- 
ery, where meats chiefly are served up ; Cremerie, where 
milk, rice, coffee, and such edibles and bibibles are 
sold ; and the Cafe and Restaurant, which also differ in 
their scope, something as our saloons and eating-houses 
differ, though often, as with these, being substantially 
identical. They range too in character ; though I did 
not see the bouillon Ike Marvel describes in the Marche 
des Innocents, where they pay a sou for the chance of 
thrusting a fork into a huge pot, and get, perhaps, a piece 
of meat, but probably all the soup that can stick to the 
fork. That market is gone, and its domestic institution 
has probably gone with it. The Palais Royal, in its 
many cafes, gives the cheapest and dearest, as one pleases, 
of the best in Paris. 

But you will think there is nothing in Paris but eat- 
ing, and will be quoting the fable of Lessing of the Fox 
and the Stork. When inquisitive Reynard asked the 
traveller Stork to tell what he had seen, he began to de- 
scribe in what spots he found the finest grubs and worms, 
and how rich they tasted ; "so," adds Lessing, "when 
they go to Paris they talk only of what they eat there." 
But as that is part of what we come to Paris for, it is 
well to talk of it. Germany might learn much from it. 



EXTRAIT DE PARIS. 355 

America can have as good cooking as Paris. She has 
a people as naturally gifted with these endowments as 
the Parisians ; but she has kept them in slavery, and let 
(her foreign sisters spoil her dishes, taste, and health. 
Better elevate the negro and our cooking at the same 
time. Put them into our kitchens, if we will not yet 
into our parlors, and improve that faculty which Dr. 
Emmons found had a high moral and religious character. 
Correct physical taste may lead to correct artistic, intel- 
lectual, religious taste. The body and soul are closely 
united. Who knows how much they may through these 
organs act upon each other, and the complete unity of the 
race be reached first through this communion of the most 
imperative of the appetites ? 

AU CONTRAIRE. 

But while Parisians have these qualities of beauty, 
they lack some others equally desirable. In gardens 
and all the attractive sinuosities of Nature, the French 
are far behind both the English and Germans. Their 
refinement joins itself to many things totally abhorrent to 
the least refined of these countries. They are at once 
the most mathematical and the most unmathematical of 
people. The English garden is a beautiful copy of Na- 
ture; the French is a draught of an engineer. Once in 
a while they break over this, as in Pare Monceaux and 
the lesser park in Fontainebleau ; but they prefer a 
more artificial style. It is thus in their political ideas. 
The freest people of Europe, they are in the worst 
slavery. With no aristocracy, they are in daily fear of 
the minions of a ruler chosen by their own suffrages. 
The French are the product of the extremes ; the Eng- 
lish of the means. The former need more root, the latter 
more air. Alike as all men are fundamentally, they will 
become, by the rapid increase of American political ideas, 



356 EXTRAIT DE PARIS. 

one in sympathy, one in act. For America is yet to be 
the solvent of European disunion. 

Preeminently does Paris need religion, — an influen- 
tial, independent, experimental religion. The French 
Protestant Church is growing. But it falls into the 
error of receiving support from the State. Thereby the 
State controls it. It forbids it to say anything against 
the Catholic heresy. It forbids its members meeting in 
private houses for prayers. It puts policemen in its 
congregation to see that no treason is preached or prayed. 
Such officers have sat, and probably still sit, among the 
worshippers of the American Chapel. A Church thus 
tied down can never become influential. A minister 
who allows any fetters to be imposed on him by human 
law or social custom ceases to have one Master, and has 
taken to himself lords many and gods many. The pulpit 
must be free, — the Church free. Until it is so here, this 
people cannot be permanently, truly free. A Knox, a 
Luther is greatly needed in France ; is needed, too, in 
England ; has been needed in America, and may be yet, 
must be always. 

Two oddities, among others, affect you, — the numerous 
and sometimes most artistic fountains, that, like Paris 
itself, are all for show. Not a drop do their abounding 
waters afford the thirsty traveller. They may serve the 
people but not the visitors. The habit of dedicating their 
stores to some protecting saint is very common. One of 
these saints was especially peculiar and Parisian; — " Au 
Bon Diable." The good devil, has more shrines tha^ 
the Virgin, an equal, but a coraelier idolatry. But my 
vial is full, and its odor not especially rare. May it not 
make this palace of pleasure, art, and science an offence 
to your senses and your memory. And now, weary of 
Vanity Fair, we gladly leave it for the open champaigne, 
the river, and the mountains. 



BOOK THIRD. 



GERMANY. 




BOOK III. 

GERMANY. 



XXI. 




TO THE RHINE. 
A bird's-eye TIEW of north-western FRANCE. 

OT that I am a bird ; nor that one flying in a 
railroad car should fancy for a moment that he 
has the opportunities of observation that a bird 
has in his open, dustless carriage, in which he can stop 
as long as he pleases, and wherever he pleases. Still 
we skim the earth like birds, and so measurably approach 
that perfection of locomotion. Fast travelling has one 
good feature to a tourist. It enables him to map the 
surface of the country as a whole, better than he could 
in any other way. 

A ride across Europe proves how admirably it is 
adapted for one people, and how foolish are the pretended 
geographical limitations of nations. These nations have 
not been made by geography. It is Power alone that 
has set their boundaries. The only two natural boun- 
daries are the Rhine and the Alps, and both sides of the 
first belong to one nation, while three nations and three 
languages divide the latter. 

From Paris to Brussels is two hundred miles of very 



360 TO THE RHINE. 

flat country, — much more so than any part of Atlan- 
tic America, except the coast of New Jersey. The soil 
looks light, but is very faithfully and successfully culti- 
vated. Immense level fields, without fences, are set off 
with straight rows of straight poplars, that are anything 
but graceful. Sometimes other trees, and pretty thickets, 
break up the monotony ; while the broad acres, with their 
wheat and reapers, are pleasant to one on whom the 
glittering vivacity of Paris has begun to pall. 

You feel at home in this vast open world, all lying out 
of doors, and 

" Known to every star 
And every wind that blows." 

The mathematical precision which spoils a French 
garden cannot spoil a French field. Nature is too much 
for man there, however helpless she may be in the little 
spots to which he entices her, and dresses her up a la 
mode, to the injury of her real beauty. 

Another thing you notice on this ride of two hundred 
miles through the north-east of France, is the fewness 
and the quietness of its towns. Going from Boston to 
Albany, a like distance, or from Albany to Buffalo, one 
is swept through a succession of very active and populous 
communities. But there are but few towns in this popu- 
lous region which show any signs of life. Amiens is 
comparatively busy, though far less so than a town of 
forty thousand inhabitants would be in America. Valen- 
ciennes, in the north-east corner, and in the edge of the 
lace district, looked lively, and, on a knoll under abun- 
dance of surrounding trees, had a pleasant seat. Yet 
^ these, with Arras and Douai, comprise almost all the 
centres of life, and none of them exhibit a moiety of 
the enterprise of Springfield or Syracuse, or such inland 
cities. 

You are also impressed with the poverty of the people. 
Not only the lowest classes, but all classes. Out of 



TO THE RHINE. 361 

Paris one sees but little wealth. The better houses of 
these rural towns are of very moderate pretensions. It 
is not so in England. The wealth of the middle and 
upper classes is seen everywhere there. It is more viv- 
idly set forth in country villas than in London streets. 
Here a seedy air, as of poor gentility, pervades the rural 
cities, and rapidly descends in most of the villages into 
the humblest poverty, unrelieved by a solitary mansion, 
or even* by a costly and handsome church. But the 
-French huts look neat in their poverty. A pleasant air 
surrounds them which betokens a spirit within, that, had 
it culture and means, would have an outward adorning 
that was commensurate with its deserts. They are the 
only people of Europe that make their poverty graceful. 
I cannot help thinking, as I ride along, how wearily 
Q^lihe great Caesar picked his way over this country. Many 
spots are passed which are mentioned in his history. 
Towns which he stormed two thousand years ago, still 
£.exist. Swamps and morasses, through which he led his 
jpclegions, are yet undrained. The face of Nature is of 
(^yCourse^ improved. Farms replace the forests. But 
^enough remains to give one a very vivid conception of 
the ambition and the perseverance of the strong-willed 
Roman. 
^, We should go from France to Belgium without being 
^.aware of it, were it not for the Custom-house officers. 
^^The appearance of the country or the people does not 
seem affected by the transition. We are in a nation 
„, that has put a warring lion, looking France-wards on their 
^..Waterloo field, in defiance of that power. Their rulers 
J,, do all this. The people of Europe do not hate one an- 
., other any more than the slaves of South Carolina did 
•^ those of Virginia. We notice that the land looks richer, 
and the population denser. Crowds of humblest cottages 
collect themselves together over the level plains. Tall 
chimneys and the multitudes at the depots show the pres- 



862 TO THE RHINE. 

ence of a manufacturing population. For the people of 
factory towns are always much more on the move than 
those of farming districts. The cars fill up with a very 
gossiping set, and we enter the Low Countries, the cock- 
pit of Europe, and wind up the day and the ride at 

BRUSSELS. 

A little city is soon explored, especially if k be so, 
unfortunate as to come after a big one. Brussels is 
prettily situated on very irregular surface. Hills close 
it in on every side, though where they came from I was 
puzzled to know, as my last glimpse of the land the 
night before had disclosed only the same dead level 
which had accompanied me all the way from Paris. I 
found that Belgium in its eastern portions was very roll- 
ing, and even hilly, and Brussels gave token of the 
change. It is in two parts, as most of the flourishing 
cities of Europe are. The old town is crowded, narrow, 
disagreeable, yet full of history. The new town is open 
and courtly, and as bare of interest to an antiquarian as 
a new city in the West. Pass through the old market- 
place. It lies on the side of the hill. On one side 
is the Gothic Hotel de Ville, with a very light and lofty 
spire of stone, full of delicate tracery. For five hun- 
dred years it has stood there : more than one important 
event in European history has transpired before it or 
within it. Before it, three hundred years ago. Counts 
Egmont and Horn were beheaded by the cruel Alva, 
while from within he looked down upon their execution. 
The buildings that surround the market-place share in 
its history ; and the bustling old market-women, who, in 
the early hour that I visited it, were busy disposing of 
their baskets of fruit to equally lively customers, seemed 
to me only a part of the history of the town, — a pleasant 
scene which I had read of as occurring hundreds of years 
ago, and not as going on under my eyes. 



TO THE RHINE. 363 

Leaving the market and keeping up the hill, we soon 
reach a broad, straight thoroughfare. A little walk leads 
us to the Column de Congres, a lofty pillar, erected in 
memory of the Revolution of 1830. From its base the 
old city lies below you, and out beyond it hills gather 
around, glittering in the morning sun. Pursue the Rue 
Royale westward, and we enter the park, arrayed in a 
very tasty manner, and full of statues, lawns, walks, and 
drives, though covering but a very few acres. Opposite 
is a long, plain, narrow building, looking like a ware- 
house, were it not for its window draperies. I thought 
it was for law and bank offices. But I found it was the 
royal palace. Royalty is poor here as well as other 
things, and its swell is only grand in contrast with the 
poverty of its subjects. At right angles to it is a like 
plain building, the residence of the Prince of Orange, 
and some humbler edifices for the officers of State. 

But the chief attraction of this, as of almost all cities 
abroad, is its Cathedral, the Church of St. Gudule. Its 
marked distinction from its rivals elsewhere consisted in 
its painted windows. They are surpassingly beautiful. 
Only those of St. Mary's in Munich equal them in 
Europe, and they are not equal ; for these are not me- 
chanical products wrought out of flint and fire ; they are 
masterpieces of art. Genius revels here on glass, as it 
does usually on canvas and in fresco. The sacred forms 
shine in the morning light, as seraphim in that of heaven. 

These curiosities of art and history soon satisfy us, 
and we leave "little Paris," as Brussels is called, well 
satisfied with our morning call. It does not take long 
to exhaust some men and places. And one feels that he 
knows as much of this city as though he had lived here 
a month. Very different is it with other towns. Some 
not so large, are so full and so reticent, that you are con- 
scious that only time, study, and familiarity, will reveal 
them unto you. 



364 TO THE RHINE. 

By nine o'clock city and breakfast are done, and I 
am rushing southwards to 

WATERLOO. 

As every railroad must have an occasional buffet or 
restaurant, less important than the depots at the ends of 
the route, yet not unimportant, so must every traveller 
have his minor places of rest and refreshment between 
the chief seats of his visitation. What point is more 
central between Paris and Cologne than Waterloo ? The 
whole route is through battle-fields, — ancient, mediaeval^ 
modern. Roman, Goth, Norman, Spanish, British, French, 
German flow in a stream of kindred gore through all the 
ages and all the land. Brussels, Ghent, Bruges, Ant- 
werp raise their musical turrets almost within your sight 
and hearing, chanting plaintive requiems to the blood of 
a common humanity that has made them islets in a sea 
of death. 

Near the extremes of this route, the memories of 
Caesar and Charlemagne arise before our inner eye like 
gigantic statues. In its centre wanders the wailing ghost 
of Napoleon. The beginning, the middle, the end of 
European military aristocracy lie on this not lengthy line. 
Lesser men-at-arms — Marlborough, Alva, William of 
Oranoje, Wellincrton — have written their names on the 
same war-path in hardly less enduring letters. Yet all 
of its fields are less, and less worthily, historic than 
Waterloo. Six miles and twenty minutes from Brussels, 
and I am landed at the station, six miles from the field. 
A rusty old diligence carries me through long stretches 
of silent woods, dewy still with Nature's tear-drops, — a 
forest of monumental trees miles wide, (the forest, not the 
trees,) known to its dwellers as Soignes, to fame as Ar- 
dennes, — by the side of like stretches of silent fields, 
up a broad road, straight, hard, and shining as a gun- 



10 THE RHINE. 365 

barrel, and lined with double rows of tall trees all the way. 
A purely country road thus magnificently cared for, places 
Belgium even above England in its highways. The 
rental of these seemingly vacant fields, I found, on in- 
quiring of my driver, was sufficiently high to warrant 
the costly roadway. About noon the few dirty, strag- 
gling hovels of Waterloo are reached. Two miles be- 
yond lies Mont St. Jean. A huge old windmill on the 
left of the road, about a half a mile this side of the hill 
of St. Jean, is the first actual memorial of the great day. 
Under it Wellington held some of his earlier consulta- 
tions ; around it were his reinforcements drawn up ; upon 
it had fallen not a few of Napoleon's shot and shell, of 
which its aged body and arms yet bore testimony. The 
road still rises moderately, almost level with the pastures 
on its eastern side, but with a high, scarped bank on its 
western. All at once the cleft sides fall away, and I am 
standing on the ridge of my almost imperceptible ascent, 
with a broad shallow valley falling away before me for a 
few hundred yards, and then as slowly rising to a supe- 
rior crest a mile or two beyond. This is the field of 
Waterloo. 

Before my eyes slept the open valley, two or three 
miles long, quiet as an August noon. No traveller came 
up its roads. No farmer was busy in its fields. No 
cattle were eating the flesh of man that had literally 
become grass. Only the chattering guides were torment- 
ing the ear, like musquitoes, with their odious hum. 
Enduring these with indifference, if not with patience, I 
take in the scene. I can hardly hope to map it to your 
unconversant eyes, yet, inspired by the spirit of the great 
combatants on that day, I will try. 

Suppose yourself standing on the road that runs nearly 
north and south, looking south or France-wards. It 
descends, as we have said, gradually for a third of a mile, 
and then ascends as gradually for a mile or more, so that 



866 TO THE RHINE. 

the opposite ridge is something higher than this. Along 
our edge runs a narrow road at right angles to this. The 
portion on your right or western side does not follow 
the face of the slope, but is set a little back from it, and is 
therefore cut into the hill, at present to the depth of three 
or four feet, then over twelve feet, with steep sides. This 
is the renowned Mont St. Jean. Around this then hol- 
low way the great battle was decided. Looking into the 
valley from the cross-roads where we have taken our 
station, you see, a few score of rods below you, a smallish 
house thick sheltered with trees. That is the farm-house 
called La Haye Sainte, the original centre of the conflict. 
Three quarters of a mile straight up the valley, to the 
right or west, is a gray stone house, with a stone and 
brick wall surrounding it, larger and more chateau like 
than the neighboring farm-house. That is Hougomont, — 
the bloodiest spot of the field save the one just above 
you. These two places are in the valley. To the west 
of Hougomont and to the east of La Haye Sainte were 
outlying regiments of the two armies, — the latter being 
their extreme eastern wings, the former reinforcements. 
The real point of defence and assault was a little to the 
right, or west of the road where you are standing, back 
of this cross-road, then deep and hidden. From this hill 
the descent was sharp and steep. A million of barrow- 
loads of earth and bones have been removed to pile up 
that gigantic mound which arises just on the edge of this 
slope a few rods to your right, — a pyramid of earth, 
half a mile in circumference and two hundred feet high. 
From its lofty top a colossal lion stands gazing into 
France. The Belgians with foolish conceitedness moulded 
it after their model lion, as though their nation achieved 
this victory, — a nation of as little consequence in the 
grand result as an American county in our grander 
battle. Turn your eyes from the grassy monument and 
its bellicose crown, and fix them on the field. Across the 



TO THE RHINE. 367 

long hollow, on those easy falling hills, on the morning of 
the eighteenth of June, 1815, lay the French army, wet not 
only with the dews of the morning, but with the showers 
of the vanishing night. These fields below were heavy 
with grass and ripening wheat and barley. The rain 
also had filled the pools, and the fat soil was made loose 
and treacherous by the unwonted shower. The gray 
chateau above, the shrouded farm-house in the centre, 
and Papillotte, an almost houseless hamlet, a mile or so 
east of La Haye Sainte, on a slightly higher ground, were 
severally occupied by British and Flemish troops. The 
real centre of Wellington's army was along this ridge, 
beginning where we are standing, and proceeding but a 
few rods up, and behind this then deep roadway. 

At mid-day the hot sun had dried up the fields suf- 
ficiently for Napoleon's artillery, to move. Ere the sun 
had set, the morning pools were refilled with a heavier 
shower of human blood, falling, like the midnight storm, 
with lightnings and thunders, and a horrible tempest of 
death. 

His aim was to push back the whole opposing force 
up this hill, pierce its centre here, and drive it east, 
west, and north into the forest, the swamps, the city, the 
sea. He therefore hurls three forces at the three positions 
in the valley : Ney at Papillotte ; Jerome, his brother, at 
Hougomont ; and himself, directing the assault on the cen- 
tre, upon La Haye Sainte. Could he but crush the cen- 
tre and command this road, the day, the future, Europe, 
are won. Ney succeeds easily. He himself succeeds, 
though with awful massacre. Eighteen hundred fall 
in an hour in that little yard. Jerome fails, and that 
failure ruins all. He delays the general charge to se- 
cure that outpost. Ten thousand men are hurled against 
it. The garden wall is bloodily captured. Fifteen hun- 
dred drop dead in less than an hour, in the orchard 
within. But the (Joldstream Guards still hold their 
chateau fortress, whose pierced wall pours ceaseless fire 



868 TO THE RHINE. 

on the assailants. For four hours he flung himself upon 
this rock, but all in vain. Too late at last he abandoned 
the struggle and commenced his grand assault. All the 
valley, close up to the base of this ridge, was in his pos- 
session, save that humble Flemish chateau. His cavalry- 
moved carelessly over the field, riding round what British 
squares yet halted below the hill as though they were 
allies rather than foes. Neither party could spend their 
force or their ammunition except in actual assault and 
defence. At this hour "Wellington set the trap whereby 
he caught his mighty game, and won for himself an ever- 
lasting name.^ He withdraws all his forces, save those 
at Hougomont, from the visible field. Behind this gully- 
like road, on your right, his troops are mustered in solid 
squares. Napoleon sees the seeming retreat. A grim 
smile lights up his passionless countenance. "The little 
Englishman requires a lesson," he had said the night 
before. The little Frenchman now intends to teach it. 
It is the first step backward of the Iron Duke, It leads 
straight to destruction. 

He orders the main assault. Thousands of cuirassiers 
in two columns gallop across the valley, and begin to 
ascend the steep incline. They strike the top, and lo ! a 
horrid grave lies yawning at their feet. Their steeds 
press back from the fatal pit, but the force behind impels 
them forward. They leap into the air and fall, rider and 
horse, into the devouring gulf. One third of the gleam- 
ing host fill up the chasm, and make a causeway of living 
men and horses. The rear still gallop forward. Then 
opens on the half-discomfited cavalry the fire of thirteen 
squares and a hundred guns. All these did not put them 
to rout. Over their engulfed brethren, over the bayonets 
of the first line of the enemy and the balls of the second, 
they sprang into the heart of the foe, " sabring the gun- 

1 In this statement all writers do not agree. But such is the story 
of the guides, and it is confirmed by Victor Hugo, and substantially 
by Booth, — good authorities on each side. 



TO THE RHINE. 369 

ners there," with a fury that seemed, nay, was, super- 
human. 

Still, as at Hougomont, so here, did the British receive 
in calm steadiness the awful shock. The gaps in the 
lines were instantly and coolly filled. On every side 
blazed the fires of death ; on every side their unmoved 
souls confronted them. Wellington orders, and the Eng- 
lish cavalry leap upon the French, and the carnage 
becomes yet more horrible. Artillery, infantry, cavalry, 
are piled high upon each other ; cannon roaring, sabreS 
flashing, muskets rattling, bayonets thrust into the bowels 
of overflying horses ; such a storm of hell never raged 
before on this planet. It was unsurpassed in the elements 
of courage, tenacity, daring, and contempt of death, by 
any that could be fought in the universe. Greater spirits 
may have fought greater battles. None more completely 
filled up the measure of their capacity, and surpassed all 
ordinary computations of that capacity, by their wonder- 
ful profligacy of life, than did those contending hosts on 
this most quiet and sunny upland. 

For two hours the combat went forward. Seven 
squares were annihilated and sixty guns spiked. Then 
came a pause. Each side was exhausted, but defiant. 
Napoleon had no reserves to send to Ney. Wellington 
none to replace his wasted contestants. The battle would 
have probably been a drawn game had not Bliicher ap- 
peared in the distance. For though Wellington did not 
yield an inch, he was slowly yet surely bleeding to death. 
He could not have driven Napoleon from the field. But 
look away across the valley to your left, keeping still 
your first position, — beyond the hamlet of Papillotte, 
whose " hamlet " part is left out, — over Napoleon's right 
shoulder as he is gazing from the opposite ridge on this 
erupting volcano of thunder, lightning, smoke, and blood. 
See that silent mass, whether cloud, trees, or men, who 
knows ? Napoleon's quick eye saw it long ago ; ex- 
24 



370 TO THE RHINE. 

amined, questioned, reconnoitred, and found it was the 
vanguard of Bliicher, waiting for the main -body. They 
were there at mid-day, when the battle was beginning. 
It was five o'clock ere they could enter the fray. They 
charge upon the rear of the exhausted army, and Napo- 
leon's career is closed. 

How peaceful is this scene ! Where now are the 
gleaming squadrons, the roaring cannon, the steady-kneed 
infantry, the plunging cavalry, the fierce encountering 
foes, as close and deadly as Homer's heroes ? Like the 
plains of Troy are those of Waterloo. Is it possible 
that at this hour of such a summer's day, nigh fifty years 
ago, this earth trembled with the shock of a hundred 
thousand men ? Is it possible • that the same sun saw 
sixty thousand lying dead upon these grassy slopes and 
valleys ? Is it possible that this deep calm was broken 
by that awful rush and rattle and roar, while two small, 
calm-faced men sat on calm horses and directed the 
movements of the drama ? One was within a rod of 
where we stand, during almost the whole battle ; the 
other was just across the valley, and once, came to the 
farm-house, almost within biscuit toss of his rival's post. 
It is as difficult to reanimate the scene with these re- 
alities as to replace the blue and gold of a June heaven 
with the thundercloud that but lately filled it with dark- 
ness and destruction. 

Yet other questions arise, more difficult to answer. 
To what purpose is this bloody waste ? Have these 
fields yielded a harvest of principles such as would never 
otherwise have flourished upon the earth ? Was this car 
of Victory, the car of Progress ? Such questions receive 
affirmative replies when asked over the fields of Caesar 
and Charlemagne. They are yet more evidently true at 
Lexington and Saratoga and Yorktown ; most certain at 
Gettysburg and Chattanooga, at Atlanta and Richmond. 
How is it at Waterloo ? The scales hang even. The 



TO THE RHINE. 371 

imperialism of birth subdues the imperialism of de- 
■<mocracy. Universal suffrage had made one man its 
representative and master, and those into whose rank he 
essayed to lift himself cast him down headlong. Napo- 
leon dies, not Democracy. England wins, but her insti- 
tutions lose. The people still live ; and, in spite of new 
Napoleons and old monarchies, will yet be masters of 
Itheir own destinies. Wellington cannot be great in his- 
tory, because he overthrew the betrayer of liberty, but 
.not in the interests of liberty. Despite this victory, he 
iTtvill rank below Marlborough, Frederic, or Gustavus 
Adolphus ; far below Washington, Garibaldi, Sherman, 
and Grant. He settled nothing in the interests of man. 
He overthrew a usurper ; he did not establish the right- 
ful sovereign. He was the man-servant of kings, and 
can never be honored as a king of men. 

It was a pleasant walk that summer afternoon to the 
depot. A little beyond the village of Waterloo, a string 
of less than a dozen huts lay along the descending road- 
side. Between each door and the road stood a barn, and 
a pit for the reception of its offal, whose pungent fra- 
grance was a powerful substitute for an American flower- 
garden. The dwellings received the incense that floated 
ceaselessly inward. The great forest gave a welcome 
shade from the hot sun, and was pleasant company to 
the solitary that sat, slept, and sauntered beneath .its 
branches. 



THE STATION. 

The station in the clearing of the forest of Soignes 
is the most pioneerish and American of any I have 
seen abroad. One could easily fancy that he was among 
primitive forests, and that log-cabins and the insignia 
of American civilization were peeping out of the deep- 
tangled wildwood that stood, solemn and silent, on every 



372 TO THE RHINE. 

side. Even when this fancy was swept away by the 
rude sense of reality, and I was aware that it was no 
American forest, with its interminable and unexplored 
depths, that gloomed upon me, as I sat musing on the 
pleasant " stoop " of the station-house, but one of nar- 
row range, whose every rood had been for ages as 
thoroughly explored as a private park, — it was then a 
historical forest, famed for hundreds of years ; and I could 
none the more, nay, far the less, shake off its weird 
fascinations. They grew the more rapidly. I looked 
no longer for log-cabins and white-headed Yankee young- 
lings and trampling buffaloes and painted Indians and 
the swinging axe of the long, lank woodsman of the 
West. The woods were peopled with German fairies 
and elves ; with wild boars and their huntsmen ; with 
fugitives from justice and society ; with green-coated 
trumpeters leading their predatory bands, gay and brave 
and bloody. I saw Will, the Wild Boar of Ardennes, 
the Eobin Hood of Flanders, with his attendant ma- 
rauders and their spoils, come riding out into the clearing, 
and, reining up his caparisoned steed, assume the port 
of a royal warrior. So contrary are forest-clearings in 
Europe and America. 

The train broke up my historic and geographic dreams, 
and in about two hours put me down at 

NAMUR. 

Only one thing made me pause here. It is called, by 
Murray, the Belgian Sheffield ; but as I did not con- 
descend to pause at the English Sheffield, I should not 
be very likely to stop to inspect its little sister of the 
Low Countries. Not its hard realities of trade detained 
me ; not its historic fame or romantic situation, in both 
of which it is eminent ; but because here "Uncle Toby" 
and his profane fellow-soldiers went through their mill- 



TO THE RRJNE. 373 

tary service. At Namur he studied the fortifications 
which he so much delighted to sketch and improve on 
paper. A fictitious character in an original work made 
me halt. I strolled down narrow and crooked lanes, 
across a funny old bridge, which ought to be spoken well 
of, it has carried so many safe over ; plunged into yet 
narrower and crookeder alleys, up to the base of the for- 
tifications that hung precipitous and threatening above 
the town. Those I could not enter. They ran along 
the sides and summit of a steep-sided cliff. 

The Meuse flows under the high bluff, and helps to in- 
crease the strength of the works. I wondered where 
the wise old simpleton had pitched his camp, and would 
have given more to have known the location of the Brit- 
ish forces then, than to have explored the frowning for- 
tress above or the noisy factories below. And yet the 
beastly parson's fancy created the whole. He knew no 
more of Namur than of Naaman. He had a character 
to create, and created him. He must locate him in the 
army, and the army was stationed here. Its only value 
to a tourist, is in its utter valuelessness to its government 
and its citizens. As if one should search Salem over, 
as I doubt not some have, to find the " House of Seven 
Gables," or London for " the Bridge of Sighs," or Yankee 
land for " Jaalam," the residence of her chief satirical 
poet, "Hosea Biglow;" so much more substance is there in 
Prospero's bubbles than in the too solid flesh of actual ex- 
istences. I found my bubble broke when it touched upon 
a steel point of reality. Sitting at the depot, after a brief 
exploration of Uncle Toby's town, and waiting for the 
train, a spruce young gentleman, being evidently a runner 
for some of these factories, sat himself at my side, and 
commenced his fascinations. I had heard and foolishly 
believed that the Yankee was the inquisitor-general of 
the world, — Torquemada himself yielding him the palm 
both in the inquisitorial and the torturing line. But I 



374 TO THE RHINE. 

found the love of money, the most universal of passions, 
made the dull-witted Flemish as sharp and incisive as 
our most leech-like questioners. 

He asked in Flemish-French if I was from Holland. 
I answered negatively in the Yankee dialect, a hardlj 
inferior variety of the Parisian article. " 

" What is your business here ? " 

"Pleasure." 

" Impossible ! pleasure ? " 

" Oui, Monsieur ! " 

The idea of seeking pleasure in Namur was the pleas- 
antest absurdity he had ever heard, and seeking it too 
sitting on a railroad platform without pipe or bowl. So 
he opens his batteries again. 

" What is your vocation ? " 

"A traveller." 

Puzzled again. "A traveller ? ** 

" Oui, Monsieur." 

" Travelling for what ? " 

« To see." 

" Have you seen the factories of Namur ? " 

" Ne pas. Monsieur." 

" What are you here for ? " 

There I paused. Had I told him my real errand, — • 
to see the place where " My Uncle Toby " had served 
his time a-soldiering, — how intense would have been the 
mystery. I had no words, I may as well confess, for so 
long a sentence, and if I had, he could not have compre- 
hended them. I turned him off with a shrug and a smile. 
He spoke of his wares and urged me to purchase, still 
insisting that I was a Dutch merchant. I shook my 
head. He repeated his inquiries as to my profession and 
purpose here ; I answered, as before, "A traveller and to 
see," whereat he shrugged his shoulders and shook his 
head in utter infidelity. I approved of his unbelief ; for 
what else than trade could bring a person to this dis- 



TO THE RHINE. 375 

agreeable den, jammed under the walls of a fortressed 
cliff? 

The cars come and I go. Uncle Toby and Sterne 
become as they were before, unsubstantial nothings. An 
hour's ride through a rough but beautiful, cultivated, and 
crowded landscape, along the Meuse and its battlemented 
sides, full of beauty, full of blood, and we are brought, 
after dark, to the charmino; town of 



LIEGE. 

Not so charming, however, was my first acquaintance 
with it. I inquired of a railroad porter where I could 
find good lodgings. The fellow said he could give me 
such entertainment. I followed him to his quarters. He 
ushered me into a poorish room, evidently a drinking 
haunt for Walloon beer-bibbers. I was tired, it was 
late and dark, and I knew nothing of the town, and so 
was in a sense helpless. One is always tempted to such 
feeling in a strange place among unknown tongues, espe- 
cially in the night, so if I had a good bed I was content. 
The frau got me up a half-decent supper, and I was 
summoned to bed. Up the dirty stairs I went, through 
a room where four beds were packed full of sleepers, 
into one opening out of it, where two beds stood, one full 
and one empty, save of dirt and the products of such 
fruitful soil, which bring forth here an hundred-fold. 
The frowzy fraulein pointed to my sty. I shrunk back, 
as the heroes of mediaeval romances are supposed to do 
when some mysterious door opens in the side of the room, 
and terrible spirits, armed cap-a-pie, appear before them. 
I had reached my enchanted castle, and the horrors I 
had read of in boyhood's days in " The Three Spaniards," 
" Mysteries of Udolphi," and other such truthful tales, 
were becoming realities. Might not this dirty wench 
change suddenly into a witch, this half a score of sleepers 



376 TO TEE RHINE. 

leap up from their pretended slumbers, and I become the 
unwilling hero of a romance that would make the fortune 
of the " New York Ledger ? " I would make one effort 
to break the spell. I snatch the lamp from the droWsy 
damsel, pass through the enchanted chamber of sleeping 
boors, down the creaking stairs, and knock loudly at the 
barred door of mine host's kitchen. It proved to be his 
chamber. He unlocks it, and I blushingly enter the 
room where his lady lies reposing on her couch, not yet 
in slumber, and he himself is in a shirt of male, though not 
quite the armor of the ancient warrior. I demand egress. 
He unbars his castle gate, and I gladly emerge into the 
cleanly air of night. Looking up and down the strange, 
silent, and empty street, I saw lights shining not far away. 
On reaching them, I saw that they were bright eyes of 
hospitable welcome. The words may appear rhapsodical 
as Don Quixote, but to my bewildered and half-affrighted 
fancy the sight seemed more human than any words can 
express. A spacious chamber high and wide, and a 
broad, clean bed, made me soon forget the dirty horrors 
I had escaped. 

A lovely morning revealed the most delightful spot I 
saw in Northeastern Europe. I did not wonder at its 
having long been an Episcopal city. In fact the priests 
had always an admirable eye, and selected the choicest 
sites for their homes. The abbeys were as delightful for 
situation as they were superb in architecture and sumpt- 
uous in appointment. No city has a more romantic 
location, look, or history. A wide and pleasant street it 
was, where I had wandered houseless near the last mid- 
night. The " men of Liege " were going to their factories 
and armories, much as they did five hundred years ago. 
A handsome bridge led across the wide Meuse, and the 
old city rose from the opposite steep banks almost in a 
style of grandeur. I climbed the streets, which turned 



TO THE RHINE. 377 

into steps ere they reached the summit, and entered the 
Cathedral that caps their climax. The early worshippers 
were ahead of me, and the large and lofty church was 
well attended at this morning prayer-meeting. How 
many Protestant churches could sustain a religious service 
like the morning mass ? It has been kept up in this 
very church, summer and winter, since the thirteenth cen- 
tury. — six hundred years. What generations have sent 
up their prayers hence to God, and followed, we hope, 
after them. • Edinburgh and Prague are the only similarly 
situated cities I have seen. Each has water and hills in 
its scenery. Each is the centre of exciting history, 
religious and political. The last two exceed Liege in 
their reformatory developments ; she them in her eccle- 
siastical. This proud and populous town was a German 
city of refuge. Priests were its princes. The Bishop's 
palace is a reduced copy, at least in its colonnade, of the 
ducal palace in Venice. The winding Meuse and Ourthe 
flow through it ; rugged outlines of the hills encompass it, 
losing their roughness in their verdure ; " vales stretch, 
in pensive quietness between " ; the quaint town is piled 
up with lanes, alleys and stairs, with tall, spindling houses, 
backed up against the hill-sides like chimneys, and all is 
steeped in a history ancient and exciting. Its pompous 
bishops had strutted in their little brief authority ; had 
given the Pope and Emperor lordly entertainment ; and 
had established the rarest order for its time in Europe, al- 
lowing only the nobility to wear its honors. Charles the 
Bold had made his fiercest assaults against its gates, and, 
in revenge for its courageous defence, had compelled its 
citizens to batter down a portion of the wall for his en- 
trance, disdaining its ordinary gates. Who could imagine 
these scenes in this quiet summer dawn? Who could 
dream of the pomp of its governors, mere mayors as they 
were, or the awful bombardments it has suffered, or the 
rushing of troopers through its streets striking down all 



378 TO THE RHINE. 

of every condition, and consuming the whole in flames ? 
How few traces do such places give of the events that 
have immortalized them. But the train, like time, waits 
for no man, so we descend the rocky stairs, pass through 
the wide and handsome street, and take our departure for 

AIX LA CHAPELLE. 

The route is through the delightful valley of the Meuse, 
which might be called the valley of slaughter, so often 
has its lovely face wept tears of blood. Tall poles 
support the acres of hop-vines which feed the Flemish 
taste, as those of the grape, a little farther down, do that 
of the dwellers by the Rhine. They are crowded thick 
together, and seem very fruitful and extensive. Walls, 
like a cathedral's, rise along the sides of the stream, — 
giving it the religious aspect which, as a portion of an 
Episcopal see, it ought to assume. We go bobbing in 
and out of tunnels a score of times in our two score 
miles, until we come rushing out over a deep valley, 
nearly two hundred feet above its bottom, and sail 
through the air for a moment, only to plunge, like most 
sky-scrapers, the deeper into the earth, as we soon find 
to the ruin of our Icarian hopes, when the darkness of a 
tunnel nearly half a mile long, gathers round us. Soon, 
however, we emerge, and in a few dashes rein up our 
panting steeds, like Browning's hero his Roland, though 
ours stood in the suburbs, and not, like his, in the market- 
place of Aix. 

What a pleasant site is this station-house ! It is 
seldom one can speak well of an American depot. It is 
seldom that he cannot of an European. With them, 
rural or urban, it is a contribution to the architecture 
of the region ; with us, it is a mere halting-place of a 
coach. Little plats of flowers and shrubbery make the 
tiniest pretty ; great sums are spent to adorn those in the 



TO THE RHINE. 379 

chief centres. This at Aix is on the side of a hill, 
between which and the town is a somewhat open valley, 
though it is rapidly being built up. Its jQne prospect, 
and especially excellent view of the town, added to its 
own spacious and comely arrangements, make it a favor- 
ite among its kindred. 

But why linger at a railroad station when in sight of 
the birthplace and deathplace of Charlemagne? How 
garish the modern beside the ancient ! "Who cares for 
the iron horse when so near the iron crown ? Who 
would drink wine so new, when the oldest vintages are 
before him ? 

Leave the new and stately houses that confront the 
depot. Descend the broad street, with its sweeping 
curves of beauty, and pass through the handsome avenue 
straight to the two things that give Aix its fame, — the 
Springs and the Cathedral. You noticed the Cathedral 
from the railway, — a huge heavy dome set down upon 
the walls, like Irving's Dutchman's head, that could have 
no neck worthy of it, and so was planted between his 
shoulders. The fountains you could not see. It being 
the hot centre of a hot day, these hot waters seem 
especially appropriate. Suum cuique. They work ho- 
raoeopathically, and draught after draught comes flash- 
ing from the pretty fountain in the centre of the elegant 
parade, for which a groschen, not of silver, is abundant 
recompense. They are the life of the town, and make 
it a Saratoga, modern, brilliant, thoughtless, expensive, 
wicTied. 

Back of the fountain, with its walks and salons as 
brisk and modern as itself, rise the blackened walls and 
low dome of the church, modelled from the Holy 
Sepulchre, and hardly more certain than that of its con- 
tents. That knows not whether it ever had any real 
sepulchre ; this knows not that it has to-day. Both tombs 
are empty ; though we cannot say here, " He is risen." 



380 TO THE RH.INE, 

Let us enter this, for ages and even yet a most re veered, 
if not a Holy Sepulchre. The inside is as little attract- 
ive as the outside. The dome hangs heavily above, an 
octagonal of rather moderate diameter for a church of 
such pretensions. Beyond this nearly circular nave is 
an oblong choir, of great height and lightness, its airy 
aspect contrasting vividly with the anterior nave, as if 
the latter was intended to typify death, and the former, 
the resurrection. But this was not as elastic and fresh 
and divine as the glories we had past, nor the far greater 
one so soon to come. 

I wondered at the splendor of its dedication, by the 
Pope and three hundred and sixty five archbishops and 
bishops, — two being summoned from their graves to com- 
plete the perfect annulus. It did not seem to merit such 
attention, at least on the part of the dead ; but respect 
for popes and potentates was then supposed to control the 
celestials and the infernals, no less than the earth's hand- 
ful that hovered between. 

Charlemagne made them swear his temple was mag- 
nificent whether it was or no. It might have been, a 
thousand years ago, ere Cologne was. Here he was 
buried, and his empty tomb is beneath your eye and feet ; 
under the centre of the dome, you read on a marble slab 
fifteen feet by ten, Carol o Magno. There the only 
military peer in the rushing river of time between Caesar 
and Napoleon once sat, in mockery of his living sover- 
eignty, in a marble chair, clothed in imperial robes, 
bearing his sceptre, wearing his crown, with his sword 
and pilgrim's pouch at his side, and the Gospels on his 
knee. How could the worms dare to approach such 
majesty ! But they are no respecter of persons, and no 
doubt enjoyed the royal banquet as well as he had many 
a lordly feast. When opened by Frederic Barbarossa, 
three hundred years after his death, and just seven hun- 
dred years ago (1165), he was still in his seat. But he 



TO THE RHINE. 381 

had lost influence over men whatever he might yet have 
over worms, and they took his sceptre, robes, crown, sword, 
pouch, and even Gospels, from him, and reduced him to 
the nakedness which Job recognized as our first step in 
death, but which for so many centuries he had resisted. 
These were used to consecrate other kings ; the dead 
man's touch having seemed, like Elisha's bones, to give life 
to the living. He was tumbled out of his chair even, and 
went, where I know not. His chair is here, not himself 
It is a marble, clumsy affair, boxed up in wood, not to keep 
profane and democratic eyes from it, but to make them 
pay for their curiosity. Give a quarter, and you see the 
throne that the dead Emperor sat in for three hundred 
years. I think he must have rejoiced when he was 
allowed to leave it and stretch himself out in his bed for 
his last sleep, like any other weary mortal. It was long 
used for a coronation-chair, and was then clamped with 
gold, making the seat, as well as crown, uneasy to the 
candidate, as, no doubt, most found it, ere they finished 
their course. A velvet cushion lies in it, whether in- 
tended for the dead or the living the verg«r said not. 
As we paid our money we could take our choice. I in- 
clined to give it to the dead. - He sat in it so much the 
longer, and in his bones too, that the soft cushion must 
have been quite a relief, especially in his latter skeleton 
days. Poor Charles the Great ! His ashes are as igno- 
ble as were those of his ancestors, and of much of his 
posterity. His children's graves are as empty as his own. 
Vamtas vanitatum, omnia vanitas. 

Other ashes of other mighty ones have followed, as in 
duty bound, their chief. In the choir were once the 
bodies of m^any emperors, but the French revolutionists 
whhled past here in their cyclone, and this imperial dust 
was caught and sent flying from its cofiins. Over their 
tombs the priests have put a wailing tablet. Little did 
those revolutionists dream that the iron crown from the 



382 TO THE RHINE. 

most imperial of tliem would be placed by the child of 
that Revolution on his brow, with his own hands, with the 
Pope meekly standing by, as Iniperator of France, Italy, 
and as he fancied, and all feared, of Europe. Extremes 
meet even here ; and the rifled graves of these Emperors 
are avenged by the imperialization of France through 
the very instrument of the sacrilege. 

Here were crowned nearly fifty emperors and em- 
presses from 814to 1531. Diets also, and councils and 
congresses, have added to its fame ; and as if these were 
not enough, its sacred relics are many and wonderful. 
In this type of the Holy Sepulchre are more professed 
remains of Christ than its original claims. It boasts of 
a piece of the true cross ; the leathern girdle of Christ, 
on which is Constantine's seal, that settles the question 
of its authenticity ; the cord which bound, the rod that 
smote him ; a nail of the cross, the sponge filled with 
vinegar, the arm of Simeon in which he held the infant 
Jesus, as well as a lock of the Virgin's hair, some of the 
blood and bones of St. Stephen, manna of the wilderness, 
and bits of Aaron's rod. All these one can see for a 
dollar, and yet I was too much of an infidel to pay it. 
But even these are not considered the grand reliques. 
Those are so choice that they can only be seen once in 
seven years. They are four; the robe worn by the 
Virgin at the nativity, the swaddling-clothes of Jesus, 
the cloth on which John the Baptist's head was placed, 
and the scarf worn by our Saviour at the crucifixion, 
bearing stains of blood ! Having no faith, I did not em- 
ploy my sight on the accessible relics: little or great, 
they had no power ; not even Charlemagne's bones could 
entice me from my Protestant steadfastness, though they 
are undoubtedly bones, perhaps his, having been discov- 
ered after seven centuries, in 1847, in a chest, in a dark 
closet. I suspected them also. What democrat would 
not ? So taking a last look at the chair in the gallery, 



TO THE RHINE. 383 

and the beautiful Greek sarcophagus in which his feet 
*^¥ested for those weary centuries, and the pulpit covered 
with plates of silver, and also with a door of wood, and 
the graceful pillars of porphyry that support the dome, 
and relieve slightly the heaviness below, I leave the 
gloomy cavern of vanished grandeur for the high and 
airy and brilliant dome without. How these calm, eter- 
nal heavens mock the momentary strut of man. 

The old Rathhaus, or Council Chamber, the little mar- 
ket-place, with its dingy statue, the dirty lanes around 
it, attract but little atjtention. I saw only the good horse 
Roland, that galloped from Ghent hither, bringing the 
desired news, lying panting in the market-place, and 
drinking the city's last glass of wine. There has been, 
I fear, a new store laid in since. Browning has made it 
more of a living picture than its Charlemagne statue, or 
even chattering market-women sitting by their little piles 
of greenery that lie upon the pavements. 

Behind the town is a shaded hill, with its observatory. 
Here you get your first view under the blazing horizon 
of the valley of the Rhine. The view is enough. The 
hills on the west are forgotten. Down we plunge, take 
a farewell stroll through dirty alleys, whose stones, if 
hot dirt, are of the days of the great Carolus ; take a 
parting glass and many of the sparkling waters, fly across 
sandy plains, where the American dust, of which the 
English complain so much, is fully equalled by its Ger- 
man kindred ; under the ruins of the castle where Charle- 
magne's beloved wife died, by whose coffin he sat absorbed 
in grief, till one took off her wedding-ring, and cured his 
'malady ; and so, through romance, grief, dust, and heat, 
speeding across the rolling prairies, thinly soiled and 
poorly cultured, with the setting sun we reached the 
second of our continental depots, — Paris being ever the 
first. 



xxn. 




COLOGNE. 

OW one's blood tingles in his veins as he plunges 
into such a bath. Two of the most dreamed 
of and longed for objects of human curiosity are 
in my grasp, — a church and a river. The excitement of 
that conquest makes even the fireside-hand, that revises the 
storv of the visitation, tremble with the original emotion. 
But emotions, unless they flow in channels of fact, are as 
powerless in respect to others, as floods covering a land- 
scape are to carry ships or factories. They must be con- 
strained to channels of description, and allowed, in their 
application to the delicate machinery of your soul, to 
work out such fantasies as your imagination may permit 
them to fabricate. They supply the force, the fact, the 
material ; your creative soul, the shapes and aspects which 
they shall ultimately wear. 

So here I am, sitting in Cologne, and in the Hotel de 
Paris, — a large title for a modest inn, — under the mighty 
shadow of the Cathedral, and a few minutes' walk from 
the immortal river. I arrived in season for a sunset 
stroll through the arches of the one, and along the banks 
of the other. All great things, like lions and seventy- 
fours, have their jackals and bobbing cockboats, which are 
the more intruding in proportion to their own majesty. 
The fame of this place is illustrated not the least in the 
pertinacity of its commissionaires. Such adhesiveness is 
not seen even among the mosquitoes of the Nile, — an- 
other example of the same law. Their every phrenologic 



COLOGNE. 385 

organ must be resolved into that, I looked to see a horn 
growing out of their head, in the place where this faculty 
is said to grow, or the whole head becoming a TenerifFe 
over its spot. The smells of the city had evidently im- 
parted a strong power of scent to these human hounds, 
and they run down the traveller as swiftly, and hold on 
as unrelentingly, as the best of their canine superiors do 
to their game. But having taken a solemn oath to myself, 
that I would myself explore the spots I visited, so as 
thereby to have their daguerrotype stamped upon my 
memory ; and having resisted the fascinations of London 
and Paris guides, I cast away carelessly him of Cologne. 
J regretted it afterward. For in crookedness, as in foul- 
ness, all its predecessors were as nothing to it. Its streets 
were the most snarled skein of dirty silk I had attempted 
to unravel. And with the clew in my hand, I often failed 
of tracing the thread to its desired end. 

But whatever perplexities may attend its general per- 
ambulation, its two central features are ever before you. 
The Cathedral rises like a hill above the tall roofs of the 
city. The river rolls broad and green along its side. 
Issuing from my chamber, I stand in a moment before 
the consummation of Gothic grandeur and religion. The 
mighty towers ascend, solid as the eternal hills, graceful 
as the elm, fleecy as a summer cloud made heavenly lace 
by a summer sun. They are still unfinished, — pausing 
" in njjd volley ; " and there they have paused for hun- 
dreds of years. Their top is crowned with earth and ivy, 
almost bush and tree, — the soil and verdure of a native 
summit. How heavy yet how light these shaded portals ! 
Their recesses are wrought in the side of a mountain, 
whose front is carved into the exquisite shapes that 
salute our upraised, reverent eyes. There is a greatness 
about it, a seeming inexhaustibility, that other cathedrals 
do not suggest. York, vast though it is, is comprehen- 
sible. Not so Cologne. Your first glance at it warns 
25 



386 COLOGNE. 

you of its greatness. "Walk around this northern side, 
where the hammer is busy completing the work begun 
twenty generations since. How these walls " sweep high 
as heaven on solemn wing ! " Buttress, tower, recess, 
coigne, the whole aspect is mountainous. 

But let us push aside the heavy curtain and enter. 
Vespers are proceeding. With hushed voice we glide 
across the pavement. The eye climbs up these tall pil- 
lars, branchless trees, whose tops spread out into a living 
roof. PiUars upon pillars, a petrified forest encloses you. 
Yet as through the densest forests a clearing is some- 
times described, so through these towering trees you see 
a brightness beyond. Following the music and the light, 
we draw near the choir, the most exquisite creation 
of architecture, probably, in the world. One hundred 
and sixty feet rises this temple within the temple, the 
holy of holies. Its style is so airy that one can easily 
imagine it to be far higher than it is, and may without 
effort dream that he is beholding a heavenly vision. Its 
pillars, roof, walls, tints, and paintings are all aerial. 
It has lately received the touches of modem German 
artists, touches " to fine issues," whose pencils have the 
delicacy and piety of the artist of St. Vincent de Paule, 
with less richness, but not less simplicity. For Christian 
humility and faith no faces can surpass some that shine 
upon these walls ; as if their prayers and divine commu- 
nions had unconsciously raised them from the earth, and 
they hung pausing and praising in the midst of the 
heavens. The depth of devotion with which the artists 
of Papacy imbue the faces of their martyrs and confessors, 
gives their churches a saintly aspect that far surpasses 
the plain walls of Protestant temples. Perhaps this saint- 
liness, however, like some its living sanctities exhibit, is 
all paint. One would judge so from the actual services 
of its devotees ; though even h'ere, we must honestly con- 
fess, there are not a few whose worship is a lesson to our 
colder, I fear, less prayerful and less acceptable manner. 



COLOGNE. . 387 

Between the choir and the outer walls are monuments 
of the dead, and chapels of relics. The rear chapel has 
the bones of the three " wise men " who visited Christ. I 
did not see their authentic remains : it was hardly neces- 
sary ; for a good Catholic professor of Bonn has declared 
that they are the skulls of infants. Probably they are 
the Magi in their infancy, which would be appropriate to 
their first mission, it being connected with an Infant ; and 
their last one, to nurture a baby faith in undeveloped 
souls. However slight your faith may be in their au- 
thenticity, you must still concede their antiquity, and long 
if not perfect pedigree ; for the Emperor, Frederic Bar- 
barossa, stole them at Milan, a. d. 1162, and brought 
them hither. For seven hundred years they have been 
objects of adoration here ; how much longer there, I 
know not. They have, therefore, a claim upon our re- 
spect, if not our reverence. An idol, however false, that 
myriads have worshipped as a god, is, in a sense, the 
embodiment of the multitudinous feelings of man, — hum- 
ble, exultant, doubting, confident. By it they have sought, 
though in vain, to lift themselves unto God and heaven. It 
has caught a little of the reverence it has received. Even 
so do this gaudy box of a chapel, and its gaudier casket 
within of solid gold, and shining with gold and silver and 
precious stones, appear not altogether unworthy in the 
^yes q€ most Protestant iconoclasm, as we think of the 
generations of our fathers who have kneeled here, full of 
faith, if not of Christ. They have made their idol ven- 
erable, if not sacred. 

In the passage-way on the south side stands the 
sweetest statue of a man I have ever seen. I use not 
that superlative as a lover would of his lady, or the lady 
would of her bonnet, but with a sense of its fitness for 
the subject. It is that of a young monk wrought in 
gray stone, the color of his habit and the stone happily 
conforming. The face is youthful and lovely, and is 



388 . COLOGNE. 

rapt in a quiet ecstasy of devotion. It looks as if Sum- 
merfield had assumed the garb of a priest, and wag 
caught in a moment of transfiguring faith. No work, 
graven by art or man's device, can surpass it in uncon- 
scious grace. The soul shines out of the whole man, — 
posture, form, and face. Beautiful exceedingly, — an 
Adonis among monks is he, and even more than the 
original Adonis, unmindful of all love save the spiritual 
and divine. Plis life is hid with Christ in God. 

But the Dom, as they call their Cathedral, has put 
on a deepening twilight. Its music has ceased, and glory 
is vanishing. The darkness that has come and gone here 
for more than twenty thousand days, has come once 
more. The roof draws slowly towards you, a firma- 
ment of cloud, while gigantic shafts pierce and vanish 
within its veil. 

We pass out of the shaded portal, and find the light 
yet filling the higher heavens. Is it not so always as 
we pass from the structures of man into those of God ? 
Whether they are of mind or matter ; however towering, 
stately, and adorned by wit, or wisdom, or wealth ; they 
easily become dark and contracted. Their wealth is 
poverty, their wisdom folly, their brightness gloom ; and 
only when we emerge from them into the temples of 
God (Jo we feel their paltriness and pettiness. Here the 
dome rises into the heaven of heavens. Here shine 
the eternal stars. Here the soul, upraised by its visions, 
finds no limit below the throne, and the heart of God. 

Not altogether of this sort, I must confess, were my 
meditations when emerging from the church and turning 
towards the second, if second, object of fascination. I was 
thinking more of the Rhine than of the heavens. I was 
glad that the sunlight had not utterly fled, so that I could 
enjoy the view of the " abounding river " and its more 
abounding shores. The crooked lane that winds around 
the northern side of the Cathedral terminates in a mag- 



COLOGNE. 389 

nificent iron bridge that has lately been built, by Austria 
and Prussia, for railroad and general accommodations. 
Its ends are joined to the land by parapets of stone. On 
this esplanade I sat and took my first draught of the Rhine 
wine. Not the dark waters hurrying below me, nor the 
darker waters pressed upon its banks, and that drown 
souls as rapidly as these would bodies, but the pure 
essence of fancy and feeling into which these are refined. 
The Rhine stream is nearly half a mile wide, with level 
banks on either side, to the northward, or seaward. To 
the south, in the horizon, twenty miles distant, slumber 
the hills, which are the beginning, or, more truly, the 
end, of her strength. "We are at the northern edge of 
the city. It stretches along the western bank for two or 
three miles. It is on a plain with slight knobs of hills, 
only one of which is distinguishable, and that not of 
itself, but because of the structure that covers it. A 
wall encases the sleepy looking houses, as if maternal 
Nature, in this twilight hour, was putting her drowsy 
city-child to bed, and with these walls was carefully 
shuttins: him in. 

There was a good deal of sportfulness yet left in the 
child, that showed it was far from being asleep. The 
Opposite bank and the bridge of boats below were alive 
'with the playful multitudes. In nothing does Europe 
show her superiority to America so much as in the 
gayety of her people after the toil of the day is passed. 
Like Hartley Coleridge, this whole people "keep a 
lamb's heart among the full-grown flocks." All the 
flock preserve that heart, and delight in the friskiness of 
their early youth, while age, weariness, poverty, vainly 
seek to oppress them. Hotels on the opposite bank are 
entertaining their visitors and neighbors with pleasant 
music. Above them is a bridge made of narrow, little, 
black scow-boats lashed together, with their prows pointed 
southward, like a leash of black bull-dogs defying their 



390 COLOGNE. 

on-rushing foe. The swift current produces no effect on 
the colored regiment, and sneaks away under their steady- 
line. On this bridge saunter the chatting multitudes. 
What is the use of sitting here alone, when life and joy 
are revelling there ? This pile is cold, if costly ; that 
string of flat-boats is familiar and popular, if cheap and 
old-fashioned. I cross over and walk up the farther 
bank, among the suburban hovels and hotels that congre- 
gate here : the first from the necessity that always drives 
the poorest citizen to the edge of the city, fringing her 
royal robes with rags ; the last because that foreigners 
and Germans like both ample grounds and the water 
view in their bill of fare ; and these the crowded town 
cannot afford. Hence the chief of the pleasure-hotels 
are located here. From this bank, the Dom swells su- 
perbly on the opposite shore, absorbing in itself all the 
grandeur of the town. Above it, — that is, to the south, 
— near the middle of the city and opposite the old bridge, 
rises another knoll, the original heart of the town. There 
the Roman emperors had their temple. They called it 
their capitol, — a pleasant reminiscence of the rock Tar- 
peian and its crown. That name the hill yet retains, as 
the city does many of the words and customs of the 
parent city which gave it its population, no less than its 
habits and name, — it having been changed from a camp 
to a colony by veterans, sent hither by Agrippina, the 
mother of Nero. Thus came its name, Colonia, Coin ; 
thus its dark, un-Gerraanic complexions ; thus, per- 
chance, its odors, the renowned opposites of Coleridge 
and Farina. 

Back of the capitol and cathedral hills, at the apex of 
the triangle whereof these are the corner bases, near the 
wall that there bulges out farthest into the plain, is 
another knoll, surmounted, as are both of these, by a 
church. This trimountain, though of humble height, 
breaks up the monotony of the plains and the city, and 
gives their aspect a pleasurable variety. 



COLOGNE. 391 

But the shades are thickening and the crowds are 
thinning. The tired sun has sunk to rest. The bridge 
will soon open to let the nightly boats and raftsmen 
through. We must hurry across, or it will be too late. 
As weary as the sun, we too shall gladly make a set- 
ting. An inviting bath, dinner, and bed will give us 
the needed restoration. Pity that our greater and older 
traveller in the skies could not enjoy the same. The 
ever-moving universe must sigh for rest. Is not its 
groaning and travailing in pain together until now, be- 
cause of this necessity that is laid upon it ? One 
thinks, in such hours of exhaustion, of Hawthorne's an- 
swer to one who asked him if he believed in the sleep 
of the dead. " I don't know anything about it gener- 
ally," he replied ; " but, for myself, I jfeel tired enough 
to sleep about two thousand years.'* Whether the sun 
or the spirit sleep is a problem. It matters but little if 
our last sleep, like his daily one, becomes a glorious res- 
urrection. Sir Thomas Browne is more spiritual and 
Christian than Hawthorne, when, making like inquis- 
ition, he says, " So I might enjoy my Saviour at the last, 
I could with patience be nothing, almost unto eternity.'* 

SECOND SIGHT. 

The sun "awoke and called me early." I gladly 
obeyed. The weariness was gone from both him and 
me. The Cathedral arose also before my eyes, as if it 
too had been slumbering, and was putting on fresh 
beauty with the fresh day. The southern portal to the 
transept has lately been finished in most ornate tracery 
and abundant sculptures. The broad spaces within, like 
a deep forest, grow luminous with the coming light. The 
tall pillars stand thick around. The subdued light comes 
rosily through the glowing curtains of glass. The mov- 
ing or bowed worshippers pass or pray upon the noise- 
less floor. Highly ornamented beadles, with wand and 



892 COLOGNE. 

staff, and an air of infinite authority, stride across the 
pavement. Richly caparisoned priests, followed by boys 
in dirty white surplices, glide majestically to the side 
chapels or central altar, and while the uncleanly lads 
tinkle bells or wave incense, mutter their unknown 
prayers to a God to them unknown. The choir burns 
like the dome divine, under the splendors of the inflood- 
ing light. Its springing pillars stand like angels around 
its walls. Its marbles, paintings, gilding, carving, height, 
ceiling, music, altar, and priest, give it at once the solidity 
of earth, the airiness of the skies, the sanctity of heaven. 
But here we must not pause, though where to pause is 
always a difficult problem. " How not to do it," is the 
question with travellers, not for the purpose of escaping 
the doing, but including. We must climb to the top of 
this huge monument of piety and age. A few hundred 
steps, many hundred in feeling, bring us to the roof. 
There we walk under lofty battlements, along the edge 
of the building; looking down without on flying but- 
tresses that spring out innumerably from the choir and 
the transept, and inwardly upon the prostrate worship- 
pers, while we drink in the music that passes us on its 
way to heaven. One stands amazed at the amount of 
labor and material that enters into such an edifice. 
Above as below, without as within, every part is per- 
fectly finished ; and here, as often before, and as will 
be the case often again, Longfellow's words come into 
our mind, — 

" In the elder days of art, 

Builders wrought with greatest care, 
Each minute and unseen part, 
For the gods see everywhere." 

Only the profanity of the last multiple was not in these 
builders' minds. Not '' the gods " were their overseers, 
but the rather. " Thou God seest me " was their un- 
ceasing feeling. 



COLOGNE. 393 

Up still we toil to the top of the steeple that sur- 
mounts the choir, — its highest present point of observa- 
tion. The city and plain lie before us. Far below, the 
lead roofs of the tall houses blaze in the sun ; around us 
stand forth the massy ribs of the megatherium below. 
At our feet flows the most romantic of rivers, as uncon- 
scious and as careless of its fame as the greatest ever 
are. It is only doing God's bidding. Why should it be 
proud ? It is ever seeking its sea, as all souls are 
theirs. The ocean dwarfs it, eternity, them. 

Our visitation concludes upon the tower. For six hun- 
dred years this has been waiting completion. A hundred 
feet of its projected five hundred are all that is finished. 
Here stands the very derrick that hoisted these stones to 
their place. It became so rotten that the authorities 
feared its fall and removed it. A plague broke out. The 
people charged it to this removal. It looked as though 
the great design was being abandoned, and that God was 
therefore offended. It was replaced or renewed ; the sick- 
ness ceased, as it doubtless would have done had their 
prayers gone up, instead of their derrick. The work is 
at length proceeding to completion. The conception of 
the unknown artist will be accomplished, though not 
for hundreds of years after its birth. So will all true 
ideas find ultimate realization. Christianity has been 
longer in building than this, its material representative. 
And it has not yet subdued the world, not even a single 
nation, unto itself. Its most professed disciples feebly 
reveal its grace. Its churches are less perfect than its 
temples. The soul is not so entirely reshapen after its 
Divine image and fulness as is this building after its. 
All nations have rotten derricks on the unfinished towers 
of their duty and destiny. Pride, prejudice, and passion, 
— how much rubbish takes the place of God's trutii, which 
he would shapen with his hands, eternal rock, eternally 
carved. We must hasten our personal, social, and civil 



394 COLOGNE. 

regeneration, or these perishable temples will first reach 
their being's height. We must make the house of society 
and of the State, like the magnificence which this roof 
covers, a common possession where the poorest worship 
with the lordliest, and each feels the pulsations of a single 
life, — the life of Christ redeeming, uniting, immortalizing 
all. 

Shall we not see that hour ere this grass-grown tower 
does its completion? Shall not dissevered Germany be 
one before her Cathedral is finished ? Shall not her 
people become equal, her institutions liberal, her govern- 
ment a unit, her religion experimental, or ere this almost 
divine embodiment of unity, equality, and devotion comes 
to its glorious consummation ? Six hundred years has 
this been building. The nation has been twice that time. 
Will its end be as far beyond this as its beginning was ? 
Will the continent, the world, thus slowly reach perfec- 
tion's height ? We hope not, we believe not. America's 
regeneration, if it goes forward, will ensure Germany's, 
Europe's, the world's. Then shall this be the fitting 
symbol of humanity ; earthly in origin and position ; 
rude and shapeless in its native elements ; solid, sublime, 
eternal in its consummation. 



ST. URSULA 

and her eleven thousand virgins were too great an 
attraction for one man to resist. Through incredible 
crookedness I explored my way to the famous ossuary. 
It is an unattractive church without, plain and cheap 
within. Its marbles are, however, the most costly, for 
what is common limestone to the frames of saintly maid- 
ens ? Recesses in the walls, of various sizes and in every 
conceivable place, receive the carefully arranged bones. 
Skulls that hardly offend the eye more than when covered 
with flesh and beauty, are set around with their kindred 



COLOGNE. 395 

bones in ghastly symmetry. Along the entrance-porch, 
Over the lowly pillars, by the side of the windows, above 
the altar, stand these coffin-like cases of the multitudinous 
dead. Whatever be the truth of the legend, the fact of 
this Golgotha remains. It is truly a place of skulls. 
The heads look small and virginal. They may be child- 
isk and infantile for all my skill can detect. They may 
have been gathered by monkish zeal to give substance 
to an older legend. The Church is partly of the twelfth 
and partly of the fourteenth century. When the relics 
were placed there, I know not. The first bishop of 
Cologne, who located the event here, lived in the tenth 
century ; the legend is known to have been current in the 
seventh, and is said to have occurred in the fourth. It 
is one of the prettiest of the Church, and, in some form 
in all probability, did occur. Whether one maiden named 
Undecimilla, or eleven maidens, XL M. V. (Martyrs) being 
changed into thousand ; or whether a larger number made 
definite by that human propensity that ever seeks to put 
the solid frame of fact and figures around its wildest 
fancies ; or whether the actual number was attained in the 
ruthless persecutions of that age, who can tell ? One 
has four ways of escape for his credulity. Ai'e not those 
enough? It is evident that she gave commandment 
concerning her bones, if these grim walls are of any 
authority. A goodly audience of not very youthful or 
lovely maidens was engaged in mass. The service pre- 
vented my seeing the tomb of the Saint, and her recum- 
bent statue, said to be most beautiful in its grace of body 
and of soul. 

As an offset to St. Ursula is the Church of 

ST. GERE ON. 

With the wordly wisdom that has ever characterized 
the Papal Church, it accommodates the enthusiasm of 



396 COLOGNE. 

both sexes. In its orders, houses, saints, and holidays 
there" is a careful regard to this universal instinct of 
humanity. Male and female creates it them ; and the 
twain it makes one — we may truthfully say — flesh. 
For all the institutions based upon these legends are not 
spiritual but carnal. They bind the soul to earth, if not 
to sin. One is made to think more of these bones than 
of the sainted spirits that they are supposed to have once 
embodied. To keep up the parallel, St. Gereon, the 
wan'ior saint, has his temple and ossuary here. Four 
thousand of his soldier saints are laid up in like state with 
almost thrice that number of St. Ursula's followers. 
They are kept in a church by themselves, with a truly 
Papal regard for the outward conformities and disregard 
for inward unities. Plis church is much more elegant 
than this, being one of the most striking in the city. -\ 

One other of these ancient seats of worship drew my, 
I can hardly say, reverent feet. It was that of 

STA. MARIA IN CAPITOLIA. 

Near the shore above the Dom, where the Roman 
capitol stood before Christ or Mary was born, is an 
outwardly misshapen pile, which is dedicated to both 
Christ and Mary. Up a long flight of steps we mount, 
and pass under low-browed arches of a most venerable 
edifice, claiming to be more than a thousand years old. 
Yet not its age, nor hoary aspect, nor foundation of 
Roman, imperial and pagan memories affected me so 
much as the crowds of children that filled it, reciting in 
harmony their morning prayers and hymns. It was a 
daily Sunday-school, that in its way perhaps produces as 
profound and permanent an impression as the schools that 
Protestants weekly congregate. Their hundreds of voices 
singing hosannas, redeemed the ordinary Catholic service, 
with its genuflexions, osculations, and tintinabulations, of 



COLOGNE. 397 

much of its exterior weakness, and made it for once, and 
*X must say for almost the only time that I have attended 
it, throughout all Europe, seem natural, spiritual, and 
profitable. What a power it has, would it but rightfully 
use it ! These girls and boys singing in the vaulted 
arches which had reechoed to the like childish treble of 
their fathers' fathers and their mothers' mothers for so 
many generations, excited emotions that all the magnifi- 
cence of the adjoining Cathedral could not approach. A 
living soul as easily towers above all human achieve- 
ments, as the sky swells divinely over the most aspiring 
earth. Here were immortals hymning the praises of 
their Creator and Redeemer : what was up-piled stone, 
however lofty and marvellously congregated, to their 
revelations ? It was the fitting crown to Cologne. I 
had come hither with the most intense curiosity, — a river, 
a temple, an ossuary, a fragrant water, and unfragrant 
streets, a history of two millenniums, — what had I not 
learned and conned by rote concerning the famous town ? 
I see the sights, and my spirit, like the Queen of Sheba's, 
faints within me. And as her amazement at the sight 
of temple and regal grandeur sought expression in 
words, so did my admiration rise to its uttermost when, 
standing in a temple w^hose name I had never heard 
till I reached the city, I listened to hundreds of youth- 
ful voices worshipping God. Human nature guided and 
filled by the Spirit divine is the most august, exalted, 
and entrancing sight of earth. They shall perish, but 
this remaineth. The Cathedral shall crumble, the stream 
become dry, the city evanish ; but these souls, if faithful 
to their morning orisons, shall worship forever the same 
Jesus, under the eternal arches of the temple in the 
heavens. 

The crooked lanes are bustling with almost London 
life. The ancient Roman paths around their capitol, 



398 COLOGNE. 

market-place, and prsetorium, are as redolent and as ener- 
getic as when Germanicus ruled here among his legions, 
and Agrippina, his daughter, was born into his rejoicing 
arms. Little did he dream of the soul that was smiling 
upon him, nor of her offspring, more hideous, if possible, 
than herself, which she should bear for the execration of 
all ages. The praetorium has been the council-chamber 
for centuries ; the capitol, a Christian temple ; but his mar- 
ket-place is ours ; and the country women to-day, as then, 
dispose of their ephemeral wares to like ephemeral eaters. 
Trajan here received his summons to the purple. Two 
of his successors assumed the same honor, and one of 
them met his fate in this very spot. And yet the old 
streets are crowded with self-important burghers and 
travellers, as unmindful of their dusty nothingness as 
were these wide-striding Italians twenty centuries ago: 

" Oh, why should the spirit of mortal be proud?" 

The streets are intolerable in their pavements, — little 
round cobble-stones covering both sidewalk and centre. 
They are otherwise not as complainable as Coleridge's 
epigram would make them, nor the in-door essences as ex- 
quisite. The odors are limited in number and degree, 
as well as in extent. Most of the city is less odorous 
than many streets of New York. 

This talk, began in the chamber of my Cologne hotel, 
with its ambitious title, is continued in the cozier dining- 
room of my Coblentz guest-house. The pipes of the 
German guests, together with their ceaseless, and, to me, 
senseless chatterings, have given an obscurity and confu- 
sion to the inward visions, — a contribution that they 
hardly needed, their own conceptions being sufficiently 
broken and beclouded. For the extra degree therefore 
of these defects give these gentlemen of the pipe and 
tongue the credit, and consider them as traces of travel, 
the aroma and interlarded fragments of foreign speech 



COLOGNE. 



399 



and air, with which returned tourists unconsciously spice 
their talk and ways. Its many defects, are, therefore, 
foreign and au fait^ and hence, like musical discords, are 
no defects, but the highest expression of art. With such 
a medicine for your exhausted patience let us turn from 
Cologne to that of which it is the head and front, — the 
Rhine. 





XXIII. 



A PILGRIMAGE ON THE RHINE. 




NiEDERWALD, OPPOSITE BiNGEN, July 29th. 

N a hisrh hill is Niederwald. Thouo^h its name 
implies that it is of a lower region, it is only 
so in relation to the Oberwald, a superior range 
of upland on the west side of the river. It is at the 
end of the Rhine District. My hostelry is in a solitary 
place in the woods. No house is near it. It stands in 
the midst of a clearing of a few score of acres, surrounded 
by thick forests. It is an aristocratic property, being 
nothing less than the hunting-seat of Count Bassenheim. 
But these German counts are not, like their English 
cousins of that rank, endowed with great wealth ; and 
so he finds it more profitable to rent his house for a res- 
taurant, especially as most of the game he could kill here 
would be no bigger than ants and musquitoes. It is nine 
o'clock, and has long been dark. That has not prevented 
me from taking my supper, after the pleasant German 
fashion, on the lawn and under the stars. Other guests 
were enjoying themselves in like manner at adjacent 
tables. 

And now in my wide and pleasant room I am inclined 
to give you an itinerary of my wanderings on and along 
the renowned river. It is far below me ; yet I have been 
lingering along its banks so many hours that it seems to 
be flowing, as it has been, close under my eyes, with its 
fringe of mountains, vines, villages, and castles. I can- 



A PILGRIMAGE ON THE RHINE. 401 

not hope to give you an idea of what is so vividly im- 
pressed on my own mind. It is a long road from one's 
eyes to his fingers, from his thoughts to his speech ; 
much longer from his feelings to those of his reader. 
And the crowd of visions and thoughts which these 
three days' experiences have laid up in me may have to 
remain there, like Ginevra in the trunk, with no power 
of escape, and doomed to ultimate if not speedy death. 
Yet they will try, as she probably did, to get out of their 
dungeon where they dwell. If you find that they do 
not succeed, and you see nothing as you look at this 
picture but a vague entanglement of ideas and sights, 
blame the instrument, and not the objects it fails to set 
before you ; for the Hhine is worthy of its fame, great 
as that fame is. I have walked along its banks, sat and 
slept beside them, and have formed for it almost a Ger- 
man attachment. Let me give you the sober tale of my 
pilgrimage. It is the best way to set before you that of 
which you have read so much and know so little. I 
trust this new reading will not greatly increase the old 
ignorance. 

The whole of the Rhine that is scenically famous 
is compressed within the short space between Bonn and 
Bingen, about ninety miles. Below Bonn, its banks are 
as tame as Long Island ; above Bingen, no better than 
the Hudson above the Catskills. History pays but little 
regard to scenic peculiarities, and so the upper and the 
lower banks are equally abundant in her stores. Cologne 
and Holland below. Spires and Worms above, are his- 
torically greater than any place between. But the com- 
bination of Nature with man does not exist there, and 
that is what preeminently draws our feet hither. 

We pass Bonn, a pleasant town on the river's edge 

of a rich, wide plain. It has attractions, — a university, 

the graves of Niebuhr, Schlegel, and Beethoven, — the 

birthplace also of this almost sole poet of music. Other 
26 



402 A PILGRIMAGE ON THE RHINE. 

composers merely compose, — that is, put together sounds ; 
he fills them with ideas. But one cannot see, any more 
than he can study, everything he wishes. Bonn, too, 
being only a level city, does not come within my curri- 
culum. So we sweep past, the eyes fastened on the 
mountains that grow on the opposite bank. Five miles, 
and we are under them. 



DRACHENFELS. 

The boat stops, and we land at the foot of the " castled 
crag of Drachenfels." Half an hour's slow work through 
vines, woods, and rocks, in a sultry sun, brings me to its 
summit. And there, for the first time, the Rhine is really 
before me. One has to get above a landscape to under- 
stand it. It is our master when we are on its level ; 
we are its, only when we rise above it. A huge rock 
concludes the hill itself, scarred by Nature and the need 
of man, — for its quarries supplied the stone for the Ca- 
thedral of Cologne ; not the first time that out of a side 
has been taken beautiless ribs, which have grown into 
wonderfujl life and loveliness. On this sharp front, a 
thousand feet above the river, rise two huge walls, all 
that remain of the ancient castle. Under their shade I 
look out over the Rhine. Twenty miles to the north is 
Cologne. 

" Sown in the centre of a monstrous plain, 
The city glitters like a grain of salt." 

A little this side is Bonn. Around this city the fields lie 
level, — cut into squares and patches as the Connecticut 
meadows appear from Mount Holyoke. In fact, Drachen- 
fels and Holyoke are not unlike in height and in position, 
with reference to the valley and the neighboring hills. 
Flat and carved valleys are to the west and north here, 
as they are there. The hills are east and south, as 
there ; only the valley is larger, and, directly before us, 



A PILGRIMAGE ON TEE RHINE. 403 

begins to roll somewhat in the waves that heap up 
into great crests further south. To the east are only- 
high wooded hills. Some of these are castled and ven- 
erable. On the highest, a beautiful green cone, four hun- 
dred feet above us, is an abandoned archbishop's palace, 
whose occupant became a Protestant and sheltered Me- 
lancthon in the days of his peril. 

On this lofty esplanade, under young but well shading 
trees, amid the romance and history of ages, I enjoyed a 
most prosaic dinner. That and the survey finished, a 
girl stands near with a paint-pot, and invites me to make 
myself immortal on the face of the quarry. Two gros- 
chen, or five cents, is cheap for fame, so for the first time 
I am tempted to buy the favors of the fickle mistress. 
But the boat was near, the rocks well covered, and I 
green at the business. So I failed in printing aught 
save my initials, which, being very common letters, will 
avail but little w^ith posterity. I wanted to get Mass., 
U. S. A., among these European hieroglyphs, but space 
and time failed. " Ohio " is put up, however, in a most 
legible spot. So we are not without representation. 
After absorbing both time and groschen, the girl said, 
very quietly, " Sie mussen laufen," — " You must run." 
And I found she was right in this, if not in her tempta- 
tions. So I lost my pennies and patience, got tired and 
hot and in a perspiration, all for a fame which I failed 
to secure. Let others take warning by my misfortune, 
and, with Wolsey and me, fling away ambition. 

From beneath, and especially from the south, Drach- 
enfels has a very majestic appearance. It springs up 
from the edge of the river, light, fierce, and strong as 
an Achilles. Opposite to it, but on a lower point, is a 
ruined arch, overrun with ivy, standing on the edge of a 
woody precipice. Just above in the heart of the river, 
is a little island full of grass and trees, on which is a 
large, three-story, square, old-fashioned, white stone build- 
ing. Here begins the romance of the Rhine. 



404 A PILGRIMAGE ON THE RHINE. 



ROLAND AND THE NUN. 

That ruined arch is part of a castle built by Roland, 
nephew of Charlemagne. The building below is a nun- 
nery. His affianced, hearing that he was killed at the 
wars, retires thither. He returns, is heart-broken at the 
tidings, and builds the castle over her home, and there 
lives and dies a hermit, watching the spot he cannot 
enter. A thousand years have not marred the sweetness 
of the story. A thousand years, too, have not swept 
away the religious house of refuge. Charlemagne and 
his family long since disappeared. Roland's castle is 
but a bit of a wall. But the nunnery still flourishes. 
It was spared by Napoleon, at the intercession of Jose- 
phine. The two greatest of French captains — the only 
two that made her an empire and extended her domin- 
ions beyond the Rhine — almost come together at this 
spot, and love connects them to it and each other. But, 
stronger than these armed warriors, religion survives, 
and retains her ancient place and power. It is some- 
thing to look upon a spot where sorrow has found shelter 
and comfort for a whole millennium. Much as we may 
acknowledge its abuses and unfitness for our age, we 
cannot but respect so ancient and so permanent an insti- 
tution of religion. 

The hills draw near the river on both sides. They 
are of very nearly a uniform height, — seven to nine 
hundred feet, — and slope up sometimes gradually, some- 
times abruptly. Their steep sides are covered usually 
with wood on the right bank and vines on the left as we 
ascend, the latter probably having the best exposure. A 
fine Gothic church is perched on the high jutting point 
three miles below Drachenfels on the opposite bank, and 
processions of peasants with glowing banners are creeping 
up to it from under the cliflf. 



A PILGRIMAGE ON THE RHINE. 405 



HAMMERSTEIN AND ANDERNACH. 

The hills assume bolder forms. Far up on our left 
is a huge mass of ruins on a very ragged promontory, 
looking up and down the stream. Authentic history 
plants its foot here, for. oddly enough, these much lauded 
castles are many of them without a name. Legends 
alone people their walls and write their story. But 
that is the Hammerstein castle built in the tenth cen- 
tury, and the refuge in 1105 of the Emperor Henry IV., 
when persecuted by his son. So says the guide-book. 
You are not much better off ; for who this emperor was, 
and why he was persecuted, and how Absalom got the 
advantage of his father, I cannot tell. You must look 
that up in your library. Enough that the proudest ruler 
of these regions was constrained to go up into that high 
place and cry, " Absalom ! my son ! my son ! " The 
Swedes poured their army around it, and an archbishop 
destroyed it in 1660. Ministers meddled in politics in 
those days as badly as they do in America now. He 
went further, and became a fighting parson. No doubt 
he acted for the best interests of his people ; for this 
was but a robber's nest that rifled Cologne of its treas- 
ures, and deserved destruction. 

The grand and green defile through which the river 
has been flowing here subsides, on our right, into a low 
plain some ten miles long, at whose lower or northern 
edge is Andernach, and at its upper, Coblentz. Ander- 
nach is beautifully situated under the southern edge of 
the mountains, — an old Roman town, the camp of Drusus, 
producing, as one of its chief articles of export, millstones, 
which it also produced in the days of the Roman do- 
minion, and some of w^hich are found in Roman ruins in 
England. Here 's a pedigree which makes even a Nor- 
man look young. Probably there are families there 



406 A PILGRIMAGE ON THE RHINE. 

who have pursued the noble vocation of stone-cutting 
for over two thousand years. The king ought to search 
them out and give them the ancient castle and its de- 
mesnes, with the appropriate title of Hammerstein. 

On these plains, between Andernach and Coblentz, 
Caesar and Napoleon are said to have crossed the Rhine 
at the same point, and for the same purpose, and with 
the same final issue. So history repeats itself. Is it a 
spiral ? Were Napoleon's ends grander than Caesar's ? 
In reality, no. Christianity may give them a loftier 
issue. That alone can. Csesar was the voice of one 
crying in the vast wilderness of northern Europe, — 
" Prepare ye the way of the Lord ; make his paths 
straight." Napoleon was also the minister of Divine jus- 
tice, sweeping away a false Church and false rulers, with 
immense heaps of venerated rubbish on which they had 
enthroned themselves, and under which they had buried 
all the rights of man and of God. You feel at every step 
the great need there was of him and the gigantic work 
he accomplished. Both forgot who raised them up, and 
hence both were overthrown. But their work remained ; 
and Christianity and liberty will yet as much recognize 
the services of the Revolutionary army of France and 
its wonderful head as it does the services of Caesar and 
his legions. 

COBLENTZ. 

It is dark ere we reach Coblentz and the frowning 
walls of Ehrenbreitstein. The Sabbath is quietly spent 
within its walls. An English chapel gives us the privi- 
lege of hearing of the wonderful works of God in our 
own tongue wherein we were born, — a privilege of which 
one feels the preciousness when his ears have been jangled 
for days by the unmeaning chatterings which make him 
a ready believer in the monkey paternity of his race, 
and as ready a believer in its return among these species 
to its original status. 



A PILGRIMAGE ON THE RHINE. 407 

A pleasant evening service at the English chapel ; a 
visit to a crowded Catholic church, where the preacher 
was earnestly discoursing on Christ crucified, — the first 
preaching I have heard in their churches ; a walk by 
the side of the Moselle, enjoying a procession of singing 
children, enjoying less other little ones fishing off the 
bridge, enjoying least the noisy gardens, full of music, 
dancing, and drinking, out of which often came the stag- 
gering debauchee ; a vision of the sun setting behind 
the green hills of the charming vale of the Moselle, and 
I came back, past the tall, gray, tasteless house where 
Metternich was born, to my hotel beside the Rhine, and 
there concluded, mid smoke and chatterings below, in 
readings and musings in my room, my only Sabbath on 
the Rhine. 

I found I was doing up the Rhine too rapidly. Steam- 
ing by was like looking at a fast-moving panorama, — soon 
won, soon lost ; so I determined to make it a real pilgrim- 
age, and do it after the ancientest fashion, for as fingers 
were made before forks, so feet were made before wheels, 
whether on boats, or cars, or wagons. Behold my trav- 
elling companions, — a staff, a rubber-coat, rubber- wallet, 
with two or three necessaries, a note-book, guide-book, 
« The Pilgrims of the Rhine," " Childe Harold," a « Con- 
versation Book in English and German," and a Bible. 
•Quite a company of pilgrim opposites set out from Cob- 
lentz on a two days' walk to Bingen. They had one 
good quality, — no one obtruded himself on the other, 
and all were useful in their place. 

We passed out of the gates in the early morning mists, 
sultry, yet shady. And to pedestrians, shade is the first 
blessing. There are excellent roads close to each side 
of the Rhine. "We leave on the Coblentz, or right side. 
Across, Ehrenbreitstein smiles peacefully from all its tow- 
ers. It teaches us that castles have not yet left the Rhine, 
and kings still fancy they afford them protection. You 



408 A PILGRIMAGE ON THE RHINE, 

cannot look upon this without thinking of the battles 
that have raged around it. It was a Roman camp, then 
a fortress of successive powers in the Middle Ages, vainly 
besieged by Louis XIV., taken by the Revolutionary 
army in 1799, when the besieged were reduced to such 
straits that a cat was sold for seventy-five cents and 
horse-flesh at ten cents a pound. It may witness, ere its 
history concludes, yet more horrible scenes. It is not 
alone ; another is on a neighboring hill, two are op- 
posite and above Coblentz, and the town itself is care- 
fully inwalled. The bugle speeds the departing pilgrim, 
floating its vale from Ehrenbreitstein down the river. 
I pass pleasant gardens, cafes, and sauntering morning 
walkers. A little further on and Prussian soldiers are 
busily engaged in erecting scaling-ladders and building 
bridges. Their ancestors of the barbarian legions under 
CaBsar, probably built them in almost the same man- 
ner and the same spot. It is a very simple thing. A 
squad take charge of the boats, another of the joists or 
beams, a third of the planks. The first bring the boats 
to their places in military regularity. The second, with 
like system, take up the beams and place them on the 
boats, cuts being chiselled in them to correspond to the 
edges of the boats. The third party lay the planks upon 
the beams, and a bridge is soon built strong enough for 
horses and artillery to pass over. 

Another sight a few rods below, less agreeable and 
more European, met my eyes. A party of men and 
women were transferring coal from cars to a boat. The 
men hoe the coal into huge baskets, which the women 
carry on their heads to the boat. One man sat on the 
side of the boat fishing. The women looked very tired 
and the men very lazy. That is the general relation of 
the sexes among the laboring classes throughout Europe. 
Our women's rights reformers would have a grand field 
here ; not that they are altogether useless at home ; 



A PILGRIMAGE ON THE RHINE. 409 

but America is heaven to poor women compared with 
Europe. No wonder their beauty dies away so soon. It 
never grows. A girl of comely face and form and gait 
it is rare to see. What is so common in America is most 
uncommon here. Luxury destroys the beauty of the 
wealthy ; poverty, of the poor. Perhaps we ought to ex- 
cept France, for her mercurial spirits, cleanly habits, and 
tasteful nature prevent her hard-worked and heavy- 
burdened girls from losing all their attractiveness. But 
here and in Britain their spirits do not rally against their 
fate, and their 

" nature is subdued 
To yrh&t it works in, like the dyer's hand." 

STOLTZENFELS. 

Two miles beyond the King of Prussia has rebuilt the 
castle of Stoltzenfels, — an imperial seat six hundred 
years ago. It hangs prettily over the road and the 
Rhine, and a fine, shaded drive winds up to it. I ascend, 
and am carried over the palace. It is not large nor 
grand. Many houses in America are more splendid in 
size and furniture. His royal couch is shown you, and 
that in which Victoria slept on a visit here in the happy 
days that are no more. A plain, green silk coverlet, lace 
curtains, and a very tumbled-up appearance of the fleecy 
down that will not down, — these characterize the royal 
couch. 

konig's stuhl. 

Descend and walk a mile further, and on the bank of 
the river, close by the road-side, is a little round, open 
structure of seven arches resting on eight pillars with a 
ninth in the middle, twenty feet in diameter and ten feet 
in height. There is nothing striking about it, yet it is 
the centre of much of the imperial history of Germany. 



410 A PILGRIMAGE ON THE RHINE. 

There for centuries met the seven electors, concluded 
treaties of peace, and made and unmade emperors, who 
also appeared and took their oaths here before them. 
It is called Konig's Stuhl, — " The King's Seat." Seven 
stone seats were originally here, but they are gone, 
being removed probably by some neighboring peasant 
to make the foundation of his hovel. What would 
those proud electors have then said had they been told 
that to that favor their haughty seats would come ? It 
is hard to people a spot so intensely quiet and secluded 
with such important memories. The electors and their 
retinues, the emperors and theirs, the throngs attendant, 
the deliberations and passions, ambitions, exultations, de- 
pressions, — all of the mightiest that agitate the earthly 
soul, — how they have gathered here ! But electors and 
emperors long since left the spot. Kings will soon 
follow. 

A short walk under the trees soon brings us to the 
ancient town of 

EHENSE. 

This is decidedly, the most miserable walled town I 
have seen. And but one other, unwalled, is its supe- 
rior in infamy, and that lies just above. Its houses are 
almost all from three to six hundred years old. Walls 
built of small stones, from which the mortar is gone, if it 
was ever there, surround an inclosure of half a mile 
square. Inside are huddled together old piles of mortar 
and wood, tumbling over on each other, with thread-like 
lanes, cobble-stoned, creeping in among them. A very 
ancient and disagreeable church is in one corner. The 
old village churches of Catholic countries are usually 
very homely. In an opening, which might be called a 
square but for its littleness, I saw an old sign-board, 
whether of an ancient tavern or hospital I could not tell. 
On its front were carved figures, and underneath them, 



A PILGRIMAGE ON THE RHINE. 411 

" Vulgus amicitiam utilitate ■probat^'' with the date of 1752. 
il had met with the motto before in the familiar proverb. 
"A friend in need is a friend indeed," but I had never 
seen it done into Latin. 

Across the river from this town, perched on a bluff, 
the towers of 

MAEKSBURG 

topple, without falling, like a decrepit octogenarian. Very 
decrepit and very aged it is. Yet it is the best preserved 
of any of the ancient castles. In fact, it is the only one 
which keeps its first estate. So I must visit it by way 
«of the toll I should have had to pay if its original own- 
ers and times had been extant. The visit was a heavier 
toll than the few groschen his servant could have wrested 
from my purse, for the hill was very steep ^nd the day 
was very hot. But the view within and without paid 
handsomely for the blood thus coined into drachmas. 
"Within one could easily reproduce its early and horrid 
history in all save its magnificence. I learn from it that 
some of these knightly abodes of the Middle Ages were 
simply rude masses of rough stone. The walls were 
piles of rough bits of stone, mortared or un mortared ; 
the steps within, narrow and steep ascents of loose frag- 
ments of slate ; the ceilings low, and the grand saloon, 
now made into three moderate chambers, was originally 
only some thirty feet by ten, and seven or eight feet 
high. A dungeon is shown which has no outlet but in 
the top, and into which prisoners were let down by a 
windlass that still remains. It was hardly less horrible 
than the steps that suddenly stopped on the side of a 
well, in the castle at Cockermouth. Yet this was no 
unimportant castle. Henry IV. was confined in a small 
room without a chimney, and with only one narrow win- 
dow, a sad exchange for his palace, — induced probably 
by the same Absalom who drove him up the hill of Ham- 



412 A PILGRIMAGE ON THE RHINE., 

merstein. It is still used by the government as a hospi- 
tal for invalid soldiers, though it has anything but the 
air of comfort which such an institution should possess. 
Cannon used by Gustavus Adolphus, and some taken 
from Napoleon by Bliicher, probably at the time when 
Bonaparte whipped him at Quatre Bras, look down on 
the Rhine from its port-holes. It has been used as a 
State-prison till within a short time, and one of its cells 
is adorned with good sketches and affecting inscriptions 
by the hand of Lieut. Metternich, who was banished to 
America in 1832. He was as bold a democrat as the 
diplomatic prince, his cousin, was a monarchist; — hence 
his imprisonment and banishment. The view without is 
very lovely, — not of the Rhine alone or chiefly, but of 
the valleys behind the hills that border the river. See 
that tiny valley south of us, not a quarter of a mile wide, 
a mile long, and two miles high. A little brook with a 
wreath of little Avillows twists its way through the mid- 
dle in unconscious imitation of the windings of the val- 
ley itself How soft and deep the tinted green of the 
meadow ! How solemn and paternal the great green 
mountains that swell up from it on either side ! A like 
valley goes off to the east, but that spreads up on the 
sides of the mountain, and has a mill in it, and is marked 
off into farm patches. It is a grown-up valley, industri- 
ous and human, though still lovely, as all adult humani- 
ties ought to be in their daily service. This southern 
speck is a baby valley, too small for a mill, or farm, or 
house. It has nothing to do but be beautiful, and it does 
that duty well. This sight alone repays us for our walk 
hither, and is lost by those who only steam up the 
Rhine. 

A walk for an hour on the smooth road that clings 
with even curve to both mountain and river, and we 
pass through a narrow orchard and enter the narrower 
town of 



A PILGRIMAGE ON THE RHINE. 413 



OBERSPAY. 

Like all these towns its romance ceases the moment 
you touch it. Dirty and poor, the inhabitants of the 
meanest row of American shanties are more comfortable 
than these residents of ancient, romantic, and some of 
them imperial towns. Fresh milk offsets an otherwise 
hardly palatable dinner. I gladly escape into the open 
heavens and familiar mountains. Yet one thin(j in this 
little village touched me deeply. As I was passing down 
the street, filled with women and children, I saw a way- 
side pillar with its usual recess, and in it the image of 
the Saviour on the cross, with this inscription beneath : 
" O Ihr, alle die Ihren Weg voriiber geht, gebet acht 
und sehet ob auch ein Schmerz sei wie mein Schmerz." 
Lamentations i. 12. " O, all ye who pass by, behold, and 
see if ever sorrow was like unto my sorrow." Where the 
translation comes from I cannot tell; it is not thus in 
Luther's Bible. Perhaps some earlier and ruder version 
is its authority. The exceeding fitness of the words 
made it very affecting. I am no advocate for image 
worship, but I believe Christ on the cross could profitably 
hang in His churches. And these wayside reminders 
of His love are neither wicked nor foolish. The custom 
is older than Papacy, and will, I think, outlive it. Mary 
has at least her divine Child, and He may be worshipped, 
even if in this vague and remote way. Though some 
preached Christ of envy and strife, yet the Apostle re- 
joiced that He was preached. So will we rejoice that 
He is preached here, though in imperfect ways. The 
Crucifiedought to be always before the eye of the soul, — 
often that of the body. 



414 A PILGRIMAGE ON THE RHINE. 



A SALUTE. 

After a pleasant sleep on the bank, under heavy shade- 
trees, I move on. The town of Boppart appears on the 
right bank, — an ancient Roman camp, founded by 
Drusus, a level point at the foot of lofty, far-rolling 
hills ; a most charming seat, and once an imperial town, 
and the seat of many diets. Tall steeples point to 
heaven, and merry bells echo among the hills. We pass 
through a pleasant, straggling village opposite Boppart, 
whose inhabitants are all out for a holiday. Three little 
cannon stand in the road-way, and a bit of a fire is sedu- 
lously kept up near them. Beyond, a procession is 
formed of little children, youth, and parents, headed by 
a row of girls of twelve and fourteen years holding a 
chain of fresh oak-leaves. Silk banners of crimson and 
gold wave at their head. They are waiting for the 
priest. I walked through their midst, the centre of 
many strange eyes, and met a carriage conveying its 
sacred burden. Instantly the childish cannon smite the 
hills, the bells ring, and the festivities begin. It is some 
gala day, which the priests have substituted for the Sab- 
bath, as they have themselves for Christ. 

A little below this village, and nearly opposite Bop- 
part, on a very rocky range, are two ruined walls, an 
eighth of a mile apart. They are subjects of a legend 
variously told. One version is that two brothers were 
the several proprietors, and, contending for the same 
lady, fell each by the other's hand. The " Pilgrims of the 
Rhine " has a prettier, and probably as true a version, 
which I read while slowly walking under the ^teep cliffs 
on whose high ridge 'they moulder. It is not strange 
that these piles should have no real history. They were 
built for rapine, and their name and history have properly 
gone into utter forgetfulness. 



A PILGRIMAGE ON THE RHINE. 415 

Opposite to them the mountains assume their finest 
forms. Behind the shore cliff soars one of those brown, 
treeless, concave masses in which Grasmere abounds. 
South of it tower like lofty but greener peaks, and as 
you move along your eye wanders up into those far 
depths over a mountain valley of inexpressible softness 
and richness. To sit and look up that valley, — not 
gorge, — to contrast it with the top on which it spreads 
itself, the huge, brown peak above it, and the palisade 
cliffs just below that spring up perpendicularly from the 
river, — this was worth vastly more than all it had cost 
of streno;th and time. Such scenes are not mentioned in 
the Guide-book, — abundant in information as Murray's 
is ; and if they were, must be slowly seen to be felt and 
remembered. 

ST. GOAR. 

The shades gather on the river as I draw near St. 
Goar. Before me rises the Mouse, — a mountain palace 
of the Archbishop of Treves. It stands on a jutting 
peak looking northward, half-way down from the grassy 
summits, yet a long, hard mile above the river. It is an 
admirable ruin, perfect in its form, with round towers in 
the rear and centre, and massive turrets and battlements. 
Above it, on a like jutting peak, stands the Cat, evidently 
the worst off ; but whether time or the Mouse has caused 
her inferiority, our veritable history does not record. 
Both, like many cats and mice as well as men, effected 
but little through their jealousies, and are as dead to-day 
as the real cats and mice that then flourished and fought 
about them. Opposite rise the immense ruins of Rhein- 
fels, the greatest of the castles of the Rhine. Under it 
is the crowded hamlet of St. Goar. I stop and bathe in 
the warm, swift river, and am wellnigh borne off by the 
fleet current. Had I so willed, I could have gone down 
to Coblentz on ray back much more easily and briefly 



416 A PILGRIMAGE ON THE RHINE. 

than I had come hither on my feet. The gray towers 
of the jolly Church bachelors, and the far-stretching 
yellow walls of Rheinfels, lowered upon me as if they 
fain would spring at me for trespassing on their domain. 

Refreshed with the bath in the real Rhine wine, the 
short space that separates me from St. Goarshausen — a 
little cluster of houses opposite St. Goar — is easily over- 
come, and a wide, clean, quiet house offers me its de- 
sired hospitalities. As if to illustrate the olden cheer, 
it gets up the most exquisite echo I ever heard. A 
bugle is played on its steps, whose notes are repeated in 
most airy and delicate modulations from the recesses of 
the opposite shore. A whole bar is played, — as, for 
instance, one line of " America, " — and it comes back 
to us as perfect as it left. For an hour the duet was 
kept up, and never could one conceive it to be an echo. 

Tennyson must have sometime spent a night here, and 
from his experience created his delicious " Bugle Song." 
No words can better convey the perfection of that echo. 
Read them and imagine yourself on a summer night or 
morning opposite the high walls of the Rheinfels, above 
the dashing rapids of Ge whirr, in the heart of the ro- 
mantic Rheinstrom : — 

" The splendor falls on castle ■walls, 

And snow}' summits old in story ; 
The long light shakes across the lakes, 

And the wild cataract leaps in glory. 
Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes 'flying; 
Blow, bugle ; answer echoes dying, dying, dying. 

Oh, hark and hear! how thin and clear, 

And thinner, clearer, farther going; 
Oh, sweet and far, from cliff and scar. 
The horns of Elfland faintly blowing ! 
Blow, let us hear the purple glens replying, 
Blow, bugle ; answer echoes dying, dying, dying. 

«> 

Oh, love, they die in yon rich sky, 

They faint on hill, or field, or river; 
Our echoes, roll from soul to soul, 
And grow forever and forever. 
Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying, 
And answer, echoes answer, dying, dying, dying." 



A PILGRIMAGE , ON THE RHINE. 417 

After such refreshment for body, soul, and spirit, under 
the overhanging cliffs and in the murmuring music of a 
waterfall, the first day's wanderings " are rounded with 
a sleep." 

The last day begins with rain. But a tourist, like a 
farmer, must not regard the sky. And then rain has its 
uses in shading off the picture which he is thus painting. 
So the drops are received as providential in their gift, 
and beneficial in their effect. I leave St. Goarshausen 
under the beetling crags, cross the river, walk down the 
large and lively village of St. Goar, mount a steep hill, 
and stand among the ruins of Rheinfels. Their extent 
is immense. It is d palace in front, a fortress behind, — 
always both, and a prison besides. The guide drops a 
bit of lighted paper into a dungeon twenty feet deep 
and ten feet wide, into which prisoners were let down 
like a bucket into a well, as at Marksburg, but without 
even a bit of lighted paper for a momentary illumina- 
tion. The Cat and the Mouse opposite are both admira- 
bly situated, as is better seen from this higher post, than 
from the bank below them. The old clergy, here as 
elsewhere, showed excellent taste in the location of their 
buildings, whether churches or fortresses. 

From the summit opens, to the west, a valley of un- 
common beauty. It is deep, narrow, faced with vines, 
and glides slowly and gracefully away from our sight 
into high, embracing hills. This fort has often been a 
scene of blood and terror. Built to rob the merchants 
of the riverside by tolls, it cost so much that its owner 
had to increase his tariff to pay his debts. They revolt- 
ed, and, under the instigation of a citizen of Mayence, 
forty miles above, they besieged the fortress for fifteen 
months, without success. Their failure was the cause 
of the Confederation of the Rhine, six centuries ago, 
and the beginning of the work of despoiling all these 
towers, and introducing free trade on the river. Why 
27 



418 A PILGRIMAGE ^ON THE RHINE. 

should a harbor on the edge of the Atlantic stream be 
burdened with a tariff any more than one on a river ? 
These men claimed that their dominion included that 
portion of the river adjoining it ; and what nation does 
not levy a tax on the merchandise that enters its terri- 
tory? There were no less than thirty such custom- 
houses once on the Rhine. Now the Duke of Nassau 
alone ekes out his scanty living with this impost. 

Other bloody battles have raged around these walls, 
and hundreds of the dead have filled its trenches. How 
still and serene now! In its slumbering quiet I sit, and 
take my perpetual breakfast of eggs, coffee, and fresh 
wheaten bread, under shady trees that grow on the edge 
of the parapet. The clouds kindly postpone their rain 
to accommodate the cloudier spirit below in his victuals 
and visions. He would express here his gratitude to his 
superior kindred in the skies for their consideration. 
That breakfast is more memorable than many a costlier 
feast. What could surpass it ? The rolling river, the 
black, gray and green mountains, ruined castles, ravines, 
vines and villages, a feast of fat things that made the 
eggs and coffee a banquet of the gods. 

Along the edge of the precipice I walk, looking down 
on the St. Goar's lead-colored roofs, on the swift river, 
the green and brown cliffs that wave in and out along 
the opposite shore, over their heads, far out on the 
high uplands, covered with waving fields and their reap- 
ers, the Ruths among them busy with the sickle here, 
showing the slow progress of our race from Boaz and 
half-civilized Asia to highly cultured Europe. Creeping 
down the almost perpendicular side, I pass under the 
huge, overhanging mountain of Lulei, by the whirling 
rapids of Gewhirr, and the seven rocks peeping out of 
the channel, — all of them full of legends which are 
much better remembered than real history. A turn in 
the river and road sets 



A PILGRIMAGE ON THE RHINE, 419 



OBERWESEL 

before the eyes, the most romantically situated of all 
these river towns. Behind it the mountains rise steep 
and high, but not rocky ; their summits are covered vi^ith 
grain, and a barn is the highest tower, — a better symbol 
of the true dignity and duty of man than all these hoary 
castles. The town runs a little way up its side. On its 
highest point St. Martin's Church stands out in majestic 
greatness. For half a milennium has it been the crown 
of Oberwesel. Farther on stands a fine Gothic church, 
but little younger, and in itself, but not in its position, 
more stately. A step or two more, and a ruined castle 
is seen, overhanging the last church. On this separate, 
rocky promontory the family of the Schonberg flourished, 
and long overtopped the petty village in power and 
pride. They have utterly distippeared ; their castle is a 
heap of ruins ; but the pretty hamlet still lives, and 
families as old as theirs are flourishing there in humble 
prosperity. 

Opposite the town, and on every side, high hills 
swell around it, covered thick with vines. It is hidden 
in the clefts of the rock. How can its people be aught 
but refined and religious amid such scenes ? We fear 
that neither of these graces flourish there. We pass 
out of the town under the beetling walls of Schonberg, 
and see on the opposite bank, a mile or two below this, 
another ruin standing forth. It was built by the brother 
of Henry III., of England, for his wife. Love, or its 
fiery counterfeit, glistens on all these ruins. Below is a 
village ruled and owned by the Duke of Nassau, and in 
the middle of the river is a little polygonal tower known 
to fame. The hot sun drives me. for shelter under the 
cool crags, into whose sides the roadway has been broken. 
As I sit there, a German student, with his wallet and 



420 A PILGRIMAGE ON THE RHINE. 

hammer, comes up and pecks at the rock for specimens, 
I fall into a very mixed state of reflections. There is 
the old ruin, built by a long-buried love ; from it the 
Swedes tried for six days to drive the Spaniards from 
the post where I am sitting. At its foot, in the stream, 
is the little fort where Louis le Debonnaire, weary with 
his crown and courtiers, went to die, — a spot that has its 
dungeon racks and horrid history. All these events cast 
their portion into the caldron bubbling in the thoughts, 
and made it a potage a la Julien, to which all herbs and 
condiments contribute, — the wandering mineralogist, the 
wandering American, the early gayety of the castle, the 
bloody confusion that raged around it, the week of black- 
ness, thunderings, lightnings, and death, the dying-bed 
of the exhausted king, the distress and darkness that 
had beat against the walls of that little prison, more 
fierce than any mountain torrents that had rushed upon 
them from without ; all these blossomed in the hot si- 
lence of that summer hour, and ripened into imperish- 
able memories. 

A half-hour's walk brings us to the comparatively 
large town of 

BACHARACH. 

Its name means the altar of Bacchus, and his altar is 
a rock in the river, which, exposed by lowness of the 
water, gives token of a fruitful vintage. It lay bare to 
the blaze, and so the vine-dressers of Bacharach were 
doubtless daily rejoicing. The town lies, like most of 
the rest, on a shelf at the foot of very high hills. The 
shelf is a trifle wider than that on which Oberwesel 
stands, but is yet very narrow ; sixty to eighty rods is 
its greatest width. Over it hangs a pile of ruins be- 
longing to the Queen of Prussia, — her ancestors once 
ruling there. Under it, and on a ledge just over the 
roofs of the houses, is the prettiest ruin on the river. It 



A PILGRIMAGE ON THE RHINE. 421 

is a bit of chapel — finished in 1428 — to the memory 
of St. Werner, a lad killed by the Jews, and cast into 
the stream three miles below ; but his body floated up 
stream to this place, and was buried on this spot. So 
says the legend. If that is not solid and beautiful, the 
temple erected to his memory is. Only two sides re- 
main, — each a curve, — of six lofty windows, full of 
delicate tracery, and separated by thin columns. In its 
cool shade I ate my noonday lunch, and rested myself 
with sleep. The dead of many ages lie ai'ound me, and 
sleep puts me into symbolic companionship with them. I 
gaze on the airy lantern of stone, and think how this was 
finished three quarters of a century before America was 
discovered, when there was no Spanish Empire, and 
the dark ages prevailed, — and yet no finer fruit of 
highest genius can be found in the works of our boast- 
ful present. 

Awakened from these dreams and deeper slumbers, 
the castle above is surmounted and its view enjoyed. 
The proud old town, now almost as lifeless as the ruins 
above it, is speedily traversed ; passing through rows 
of pine-trees, I saunter along the banks, picking black- 
berries. They have a sour taste, as if they could not 
be popular as berries, and strove to be grapes, and got 
only the sourness of the wine, and lost the sweetness of 
their original nature in their effort. 

THE LAST DITCH 

is the long street of Nieder Heimbach, with a castle 
stuck on its head. The proximity of the ruin, or the 
river, or something else, had stimulated the inhabitants 
to do their uttermost in the way of degrading nature, — 
for it is by far the dirtiest spot I have seen in Europe. 
Every other door opens into a stable or a pig-sty, and the 
alternate ones into equally neat and comfortable abodes 



422 A PILGRIMAGE ON THE RHINE. 

of the human fellows of the swine; piles of compost 
reek in the sun close to the doors and the roadway : 
piles of fagots and logs modify the fragrance, not the 
beauty of the scene; children and chickens, dogs and 
donkeys, men and women, mingle unconcernedly in the 
filthy mess. It had its opposites : for on one of the logs 
a girl was teaching others to knit ; on another, a mother 
was tending her children. To crown the contraries, 
almost all of the houses were washed with pink, white, 
pea-green, or such delicate colors. I gladly escaped from 
the scene and smell, and welcomed the black clouds and 
driving wind that were coming up the river. It seemed 
as if all nature needed purifying. One cannot help 
wondering at their condition. The hills before and be- 
hind them are superbly lovely, and full of cleanly sugges- 
tions. Moore's fling at America is far more applicable 
to these tenants of the Rhine : — 

" Oh ! was a world so bright but born to grace 
Its own half-organized, half-minded race 
Of weak barbarians, swarming o'er its breast, 
Like vermin gendered on a lion's crest? " 

A STORM AND REFUGE. 

Here comes the storm, black and muttering. Bulwer 
says a thunder-storm is needed to bring out all the glories 
of the Rhine. So I was favored with the sine qua non. 
But I was expecting too much, and failed therefore to 
feel the extraordinary grandeur. The hills grew blacker, 
the river rougher, but otherwise it was as all such storms 
are, only less severe. I pass under the shadow of Son- 
neck, — dismantled in the thirteenth century, and lately 
restored in perfect taste, — far better than the two royal 
restorations of Stolzenfels and Rheinstein. It looks wild 
and savage; no garden, nor shrubbery, nor arrangement 
of trees ; one untouched forest closes it around and rises 
far above it. It must be very lonely, and strikingly 



A PILGRIMAGE ON THE RHINE. 423 

shows at what a loss of humble but living affections 
these men of old built desolate places for themselves. 
The rain falling faster, a shelter is afforded in one of 
these road-side altars. Under its low arch of mortar, 
before the pretty image of the Virgin Mother and her 
Son, I find a protection against the rushing rain. I could 
but feel the sanctity of the spot, and rejoiced that the 
cross and its Christ were thus a perpetual refuge for 
pilgrims weary and bestormed in body and soul. Even 
the sweet face of His mother, blessed above women, did 
not mar the sacredness of the spot. In her true sphere, 
no one is so exalted. To deify her is to degrade her. 
Protestants should honor her as they are honoring the 
cross. In neither is salvation, as these perverted Papists 
believe and teach ; in both is influence, precious and 
powerful, as we, less perverted Protestants, have failed 
to believe and teach. Let us embrace the truth who- 
ever else may abuse it. It will make us free, — it only. 

THE END m VIEW. 

The narrow gorge that is just below this spot is the 
southern entrance to the E-hine highlands, and is not 
unlike in treelessness, blackness, abruptness, and precipi- 
tancy to the cliffs near Peekskill, where the Hudson 
highlands begin. Walking between them after the 
show^er, I find the glory of the day and the Rhine depart- 
ing together. Hills cling still to the shores, especially on 
the eastern bank, but only for a mile or two farther. In 
full view are low-lying shores, less level, but not less 
mountainous, than those of Cologne. On either side is 
yet a castle or two, the van-guard or rear-guard, as one 
pleases to call them, of the long line of mountaineers. 
That they may be concluded as they were begun, I visit 
the castle of Rheinstein, like the first that was visited 
below Coblentz, the property of the King of Prussia. 



424 A PILGRIMAGE ON THE RHINE. 

Like that too it is fitted up as a summer residence, and 
contains in its rather petite apartments many vestiges 
of feudal times, in armor and furniture. The view from 
its tiny battlements was gentle but forcible. Opposite 
were the slopes of Assmanshausen, covered thick with 
vines ; below, the gates of the river stood forth bold and 
black ; around, the forest bent under its green and dewy 
burden ; above, the river leaped over rapids whose rocks 
the engineers were blasting out, to give wider space for 
its channel and traffic. This seat is admirable as a sum- 
mer residence, though less charming than that at the 
other extreme. Its vicinity to the chief wine districts 
may give it the supremacy to these royal epicures. 

Descending its deep-shaded road, under dripping cliffs, 
and with multitudinous curves, I cross the ferry and toil 
hither between walls high and gray that enclose the viny 
treasures, thread a forest path, and emerge in half an 
hour upon this pleasant park, woody and lawny, with its 
spacious chateau and barns, all out of doors ; no enclosure 
cramping their ease with its restraining walls. It is 
fitting that the footsore wanderings should thus be con- 
cluded in the heart of the vineyards, where is supposed to 
centre the true blood of the Rhine. 

Before I sat down to supper, I walked through the 
woods to the little tower of Rossel, and took a farewell 
look at the castled and mountainous Rhine. Under me 
hung Ehrenfels, on the edge of a high rock, a favorite 
retreat of the Archbishops of Mayence. Opposite, and 
to the north, three of these once terrible monsters growl 
with their skeleton jaws upon the traffic that they can 
no longer despoil. A little to the south, on the other 
shore, nestles Bingen, known to fame by a ballad of 
Mrs. Norton. How many of these spots owe their 
celebrity to fancy ! The dreams of the people and the 
poets invest them with their sole and legendary life. 
Bingen lies at the base of moderate hills, — lofty else- 



A PILGRIMAGE ON TEE RHINE. 425 

where, but lowly here in the neighborhood of their stal- 
wart brethren. They are cultivated up to, and over, 
their summits, and set off with suburban adornments the 
close-packed town. Along its front flows the Rhine, 
swift and green. On its left or southern side the Nahe 
timidly creeps into it, and hugs the western shore with 
its dark waters as if afraid to mingle them in the superior 
current. On this side is a like phenomenon. The Maine, 
which professedly joins the Rhine twenty miles above, 
still clings to the hither bank, a narrow, brown ribbon, 
shaded off on its inner side to the green of the Rhine. 
These rivers do not lose their identity till they are boiled 
and dashed together among the breakers of the Lurei, 
"twenty miles below. Can we not, as Americans, read 
history and prophecy in this haughty spurning of the 
light, superior stream, in the timid creeping of the red 
and black threads along either side, and in the rapids and 
whirlpools of the Gewhirr, where mutual suffering and 
sorrow make them one ? 

In the middle of the channel, below us, is a poor- 
looking turret, perhaps twenty feet square, and fifty feet 
high. It stands alone on a half-acre island, without any 
marks of grandeur or power. That is the spot where 
Bishop Hatto was eaten by the rats, according to the 
legend done into very vivacious English by Southey. 
On this shore, down the open slopes covered over with 
vines, is the village of RUdesheim, on whose northern 
edge is another ruin, which another legend, like its ivy, 
keeps green. A Jephthah father, confined in Saracenic 
captivity, in the time of the Crusades, vowed his daugh- 
ter to perpetual celibacy if he was delivered. He escaped, 
and cruelly, but with pious intent, attempted to reduce 
her to a like grievous confinement in a nunnery. She 
was betrothed, and protested against her fate. But for 
his oath's sake, he demanded her submission. He shuts 
her up in his tower beneath you on the edge of the 



426 A PILGRIMAGE ON THE RHINE. 

river. She threw herself into the stream, and the people 
yet hear her voice in the sighings of the storm. The 
soughs wailing up the gorges are very easy to hear. This 
interpretation of them you can take, or leave, as you 
please. It dwells, like most of their class, on the cruelty 
of power, on love, and sorrow. 

Not far below this station is the " Temple," a small, cir- 
cular building, open and pillared, located to give a view 
up the river. It has suddenly lost all its wilduess and sub- 
limity, and become a broad and quiet stream, abounding 
in large islands, with banks level, or swelling into open 
hills populous with villages and the vine. Far away 
on the opposite shore, on one of the highest of these cul- 
tivated hills, stood the grandest of the palaces of Charle- 
magne. It was adorned with hundreds of columns rifled 
frgm Italy. Not a vestige remains to mark the spot. 
Near us, on a low hill this side of the river, is the cele- 
brated vineyard of Johannisberg, belonging to Prince 
Metternich. Every speck of ground around the white, 
square, homely palace is devoted to the grape ; for it 
pays too well to sacrifice any space upon aristocratic 
ornament. Five to seven dollars a bottle — twenty to 
forty thousand a year — is worth more than pompous 
gardens and haughty turrets. 

A GRAIN OR TWO OF COMMON SENSE. 

The Rhine closes its picturesque department here. 
From Bonn to Binge n, about ninety miles, it breaks its 
way through the Taunus Mountains. Above that, for 
about two hundred miles, it flows through what was once 
the bed of a great inland lake hemmed in with this range. 
Many scientific proofs of this fact exist. Through some 
convulsion, or by its own force, it broke through the oppos- 
ing hills, and gave Europe a river full of majesty and 
history. 



A PILGRIMAGE ON THE RHINE. 427 

Two or three practical addenda shall bring us back to 
the light of common day : — 

1st. Many suppose that almost every hill is sur- 
mounted with a castle. The fact is, there are but few 
castles compared with the hills. These swell out and in 
along the whole line ; but the castles are less than twenty 
in number. This, in a distance of a hundred miles, is 
not very populous. Probably there were a few more in 
the days of their prosperity, but they never lined the 
river; Nature held most of the summits unvexed by 
man. 

2d. Another error is in supposing them to be almost 
inaccessible. They look so as you sail up the stream ; 
but, if you mount to the top of the rocky banks, you will 
see, usually, cultivated uplands filled with villages. From 
these you descend to the castles. They are, in almost 
ever)'- case, below the level of the country, though above 
that of the river. ' They could not be protected from 
above, and were only dangerous to those below. 

3d. The vines of the Rhine are subjects of innu- 
merable bacchanalian odes and much maudlin speech of 
the opponents of temperance. Their culture is conducted 
very carefully and thoroughly. Up these steepest hills 
they are carried. They grow on poles, like beans or 
hops, and often need to have their roots placed in little 
baskets of earth. The sides of the hills have high walls 
built upon them, not twenty feet apart, to keep the soil 
from being washed away. The hills thus look as if they 
were fortified. With all this care and expense, the vine- 
growers are poor. It does not pay for the extraordinary 
pains. This is probably owing, in part, to the drinking 
habits of the people. Everybody drinks wine, and it is 
a costly luxury even here. Sev^enty-five cents is the 
lowest for a bottle at this hotelj and that in the centre of 
the district ; four and five dollars is charged here for the 
best brands. You can easily see, from this, how next to 



428 A PILGRIMAGE ON THE RHINE, 

impossible it is to export any of the pure juice to 
America. The world is crazy for what it cannot have ; 
and, if it had it, it would be no blessing. Most of these 
wines are miserable in taste, and intoxicating in their 
effect. I have seen drunken men not a few ; even my 
young landlord here is " fou." They drink all the time, and 
in great quantities, and rob the purse and the brains alike. 
Better cling to the real Rhine wine, the streams that run 
among the hills. Drinking of them often, I can attest 
to their excellence. Older, more sparkling, more invigo- 
rating than their usurping juniors, he that drinketh of 
these brooks by the way, shall surely lift up his head. 
Those that drink of the others find their heads droop- 
ing, and frames weary. Luther's wine lines are more 
popular than his " Ein feste Burg." On the walls of the 
drinking-rooms, one sees a print of a jolly young Ben- 
edict lying back in his chair, quaffing his wine, smoking, 
and smiling benignly on his Dutch Beatrice, — a fair, 
full face and fuller form ; for embonpoint is the German 
cestus of Venus : while underneath are Luther's bacchanal 
and domestic lines, — 

" Wer nicht liebt Wein, Weib und Gesang, 
Der bleibt eiu Narr sein Leben lang." 

Which is, being interpreted, — 

" Who loves not wine and wife and song, 
Remains a fool his whole life long." 

Perhaps this distich has made as many drunkards as 
his Protestantism has Christians. Let " Christ " be put 
for " wine," and we shall have the trio of the perfect 
man, — religion, love, and joy. 

Finally, if you want to feel the Rhine, walk. There 
is no royal road to this sort of learning any more 
than to any of its kindred. Skimming over its waters 
is as profitless as skimming over the pages of a trans- 
lation to the professed student of the classics. Like 



A PILGRIMAGE ON THE RHINE. 429 

Antaeus, you must touch the earth if you would be 
strengthened. You must move slowly over the land- 
scape ; you must stop and drink in gradually its peculiar 
beauties. So take my advice, and walk the whole ninety 
miles. A little bag or wallet, and a good staff, is all you 
need, your luggage being sent forward in the river 
steamers. Guest-houses, as the Germans call their 
inns, cheap, and usually neat, are at every few miles, 
and better guest-houses are provided by Nature on every 
green sward and under every green tree. 





XXIV. 



FROM WIESBADEN" TO MUNICH. 




N hour after leaving Riidesheim and the legen- 
dary Rhine, the short and thick-set Dutchman 
of a steamer, slowly puffing its pipe, reached 
Bieberich, the faded commercial capital of the Duchy of 
Nassau. From it a straight road leads to Wiesbaden, 
three miles from the river, in a moderate hollow, along 
the base of somewhat lofty hills. Its springs drew me 
thither, as they have myriads before me for a hundred 
generations. For its waters have been celebrated from 
the days of the Cgesars. Notwithstanding its age, it 
does not look old. As the Duke of Brunswick, in 
Paris, though an octogenarian, has so juvenile a toilet, 
and his face so enamelled that he looks like a dandy of 
thirty, so this roue of a town, that has been the seat of 
fashion for centuries, seems as juvenile as an American 
city of yesterday. The streets are straight and wide, 
the houses white and new, the parks of the most ap- 
proved modern style, the bazaars full of costly nothings, 
the people as like the exhausted frequenters of such spots 
with us as two peas. Most of their sickness is evidently 
that of nothing to do. Its cure is found in poverty, 
not in Wiesbaden. And yet this place may unexpectedly 
lead to that result ; for it brings many to poverty through 
its gambling tables. Nero is said to have frequented it, 
and to have built a palace here. Pliny mentions the 
waters with commendation. I can indorse him. Two 



FROM WIESBADEN TO MUNICH. 431 

thousand years have not spoiled their virtue. Delicious 
to the taste, delicious in the bath, no wonder exhausted 
voluptuaries from Nero till now have sought their help. 
But I saw here hotter springs pressing up, and from 
deeper depths than these came from, — springs, not like 
these, healthy and divinely created, but hot from hell. 
In fact, to speak plainly, I saw hell here. Some do not 
believe there is any ; some are in doubt as to what it is. 
Perhaps the hour I was in it may help them to the 
needful conception. May it also prevent its realization. 

This hell is a very beautiful place. Imagine a fine 
square, full of trees. On one side is the theatre. At 
right angles with it, on either side, are elegant bazaars. 
On the fourth side, opposite the theatre, is a spacious 
marble building, gorgeously adorned. They call it Kur- 
saal. What that meant I knew not ; I thought it might 
mean what its English pronunciation readily suggests, 
— curse all ; for it is a gambling hell, maintained by the 
State. The hall is high, wide, and handsome. It opens 
into a charming garden, full of daintiest delights. A 
band is discoursing eloquent music. Gorgeous chande- 
liers flash upon you, and statues abound, though some 
of them are intentionally immodest, which is not the case 
with the masterpieces of art. In the centre of the grand 
saloon is a table, not unlike a billiard-table in size and 
appearance. A crowd sit around it ; a larger one stands 
behind them. In the middle is a wheel, on which, being 
set in motion, whirls a little ivory ball, which, when the 
wheel stops, slides down from the upper rim, where the 
motion had kept it, into a socket. These sockets are all 
numbered, and the one into which it goes is the lucky 
number ; all the rest are failures. The table is marked 
off into numbers, and the players put their gold or silver 
on the one they prefer. If the ball slides into their 
number they get as many times what they put down as 
is the number on which they put it. Put a florin on 20, 



432 FROM WIESBADEN TO MUNICH. 

and you draw twenty florins if that number receives the 
ball. A very simple thing, you will say. Yes, all sin . 
is simple. There 's nothing very deep about Satan. 
Coleridge described him exactly when he said, "The 
devil is a fool with, a circumbendibus." But his work 
is deep. It burns to the lowest hell. 

I stood and looked at the gamblers. They tried to 
appear cool, but failed. At every turn of the wheel 
their faces were fixed in agonizing suspense. When the 
moment was past, and the cool managers with their little 
hoes gathered up the spoils and cast a fraction of it to 
the lucky better, the losers endeavored to keep their 
countenances, but they were livid often, and tremulous. 
One young man had evidently lost much, and the sweat 
stood on his forehead while he rapidly cast away his 
gold. An old, gray-haired lady came up and put down 
a florin, and lost ; another, swallowed up in a moment ; 
another, and another ; always clinging to the same num- 
ber, but with the same result, till at last she walked away 
penniless, with a heavy heart, and a heavier conscience. 

Three rooms of like splendor open from this to the 
right. A table is in each room for gaming ; some like 
this, and others, in which cards are shuffled by the mas- 
ter, and in some way decide the fate of the players. At 
all were many ladies, some of them of the first families 
in Europe, though none the better for that. I saw one 
young lady lose several piles of coin. She strove to 
act cool, but constantly fanned herself, and was evi- 
dently in a state of high excitement. She clung to 26, 
and for a dozen times planted her florins about that 
number. Twice she won ; but the silver soon flew 
back again into the cage from which it had escaped to 
her, till at last all went, and the nervous girl fled, only 
to return again and more eagerly to her ruin. I was 
surprised to see so many women. Their faces more 
faithfully transmitted the soul than those of the men, and 



FROM WIESBADEN TO MUNICH. 433 

one could but see how fearfully the passion raged within 
them. 

I could not but think, as I looked upon them, of 
Goethe's description of a witches' dance in " Faust." 
As Milton and some more clerical persons make the pit 
a gorgeous place outwardly, so does he their haunt of ^ 
sin. Mephistopheles shows Faust a grand hall, — Kur- 
saal they probably call it, — splendidly illuminated, and 
in it elegantly dressed people dancing. As they are look- 
ing, a great red rat leaps out of the mouth of one of the 
ladies. It shocks Faust horribly ; but Satan only makes 
fun of it, telling him it would be much worse if it was a 
gray rat. So out of these handsome faces, to my eyes, 
were ever leaping, not red rats merely, but black devils, 
exulting in the possession of spiritual palaces that God 
had built for himself to dwell in, but which have thus 
become a habitation for dragons and demons, — ^I fear 
forever. 

This was a true hell. "What if it has all these alluring 
surroundings ? They were not aware of it. They did 
not hear the music, or smell the flowers, or see the stat- 
uary and the tapestry and the blazing chandeliers. They 
only saw the tables, the gold, their gains, their losses. 
They only felt the fire within. Would it make any dif- 
ference if the outward had conformed to the inward? 
If the band had been howlers, and the garden a blazing 
forest, and the palace a sulphurous, pit, and their dress 
filthy rags, and their faces those of fiends, would not the 
ragings of passion make them unmindful of their terrible 
surroundings ? Are these surroundings the worst feat- 
ures of the case ? I have heard some ministers say 
that a literal hell-fire could not be true ; it must be one 
of conscience. Nay, the literal fire is the least part of 
hell. It is a part. It must be substantially. If the 
wicked have a material body, it must be subject to the 
baleful conditions of the soul that inherits it ; and that 
28 



434 FROM WIESBADEN TO MUNICH. 

is an outward torment as this is inward, voluntary, and 
ceaseless. It is the fittinoj clothinoj for the sinnins: soul. 
Isaiah has a word that not unaptly describes the final 
estate of these and all sinners who " are set on fire of 
hell." " It hath set him on fire round about, yet he 
knew it not ; it burned him, yet he laid it not to heart." 
Sin is hotter than blazing sulphur, and the anguish then, 
as of these losers now, is only of the sorrow of the world 
that worketh death. 

We pass through into another suite of rooms, where are 
the leading reviews and journals of Europe. This is one 
of the seductions of the spot, though hardly a dozen men 
are lounging here, while scores throng the tables. Here 
I found the " Times " rejoicing over the speedy dissolu- 
tion of the Republic, and comparing its fluctuating agon- 
ies of hope and fear to the dying dolphin, — England, of 
course, being the idle spectator lolling over the side of 
her ship of state, which never was broken by a storm, 
and never will be. There was a fitness of things in its 
being here. I never saw Judas in his own place before. 

We leave the brilliant Pandemonium, denying our- 
selves another temptation with which they catch many 
of the unwary. A fine dinner is served up at a very 
low figure. Hundreds frequent these tables. But to 
eat at Satan's board is putting yourself in his power. 
So I put the knife to the throat of that temptation. I 
cleansed myself from its contaminations by draughts of, 
and a bath in, the delicious waters. They are full of 
life. But the river of the water of death flows too near 
them. And yet the ducal proprietor of the springs is a 
good Protestant, and is building a magnificent church, 
whose statues alone cost $75,000. The whole cannot 
cost much less than a million. I could but think how 
many souls had been sacrificed to this splendor. But 
then, I thought how we had used wealth worse gained, 
for like purposes at home, made even by gamblers in 



FROM WIESBADEN TO MUNICH. 435 

human flesh, and that of their own sons and daughters ; 
and so came round to the goal that all men and all na- 
tions must alike reach, — " God be merciful to me a sin- 
ner." I shook the dust from my feet, satisfied with the 
brief sight of a German watering-place, with its painful 
type and forerunner of a place where there is no water, 
and no pleasurable sins to make them forget the health- 
ful draughts they now despise. 

A run of a few miles and minutes and I strike the 
river just above where I had left it, at 

MATENCE. 

Few places have greater claims upon our notice, — few 
repay it so poorly. A morning walk exhausted it. It 
was founded by Drusus, as a frontier town of the Empire. 
A Roman tower on a hill in the town has long been con- 
sidered his tomb. It reached its height of prosperity in 
the Middle Ages, when one of its merchants, vexed at the 
excessive tariffs imposed by the robber chiefs between it 
and the sea, effected a confederation that resulted in their 
destruction. How many great progresses of the race 
are impelled by selfish interests ! It was long ruled by 
archbishops, who became enormously swollen with pride, — 
a sin, it seems even archbishops can as easily fall into as 
others. In the Cathedral are many proofs of this. Statues 
of them carved in oak are perched high up on the sides 
of the choir. A multitude of busts and profiles and 
eulogistic phrases line the walls. One, describing the 
virtues of its subject, gives this lively idea of his modesty 
when elected to the bishopric, — ^^Electus plus rubuit quam 
ipsa episcopalis purpura;^* "When elected bishop he 
blushed more deeply than the episcopal purple robe 
itself." He must have looked queer ! The force of this 
official pride reached its culmination in the statue of one 
of them larger than life, with his hands on the crowned 



4:36 FROM WIESBADEN TO MUNICH. 

heads of three boyish looking emperors. He had presided 
at their coronation, — that being a privilege of this dio- 
cese. He towers over them with serene self-complacency, 
paternal and patronizing, that is indescribable ; while 
they look as children used to under the manipulation of 
ancestral parsons, — half-scared, half-sensible of the great 
honor he is conferring. 

The caricature was perfect, and all the better for being 
unintentional. Near it is a red stone slab of the thirteenth 
century, with a rude Q^gy of St. Boniface, the first Arch- 
bishop of Mayence, — a really great man and a great 
Christian. For all this had a Divine beginning, as man 
himself had, however far it has fallen. There is no 
greater hero in Christian history than Boniface ; and we 
could easily revive these wildernesses and heathen savages 
among whom he came nearly twelve hundred years ago, 
from an English monastery, preaching the gospel of the 
kingdom. He was in labors most abundant, and his 
works still follow him. Many churches bear his name, 
many biographers extol his papalism, and yet he was far 
more of a Christian than a Churchman. These leaders 
know what power there is in connecting the real saints 
and martyrs of the Church with themselves, and they do 
it ceaselessly and skilfully. We shall have to take this 
weapon out of their hands and surpass them in a wise use 
of the true Church Fathers, before we can subdue them. 

As a body, Protestants have no uninspired history be- 
yond the Reformation. Most of them almost fancy that 
between Paul and Luther there was only a mass of 
Christless priests. This is a great mistake, and one 
could do no better service to our youth than to substitute 
for the religious fiction they now are condemned to read 
— a fiction as false and deleterious as that with which 
Papal guides poison their youth — a true history of the 
real heroes of the Church, ministers, missionaries, and 
martyrs, Boniface, Bede, Bernard, Ambrose, Augustine, 



FROM WIESBADEN TO MUNICH. 437 

Athanasius, Chrysostom, Sebastian, Helena, — pointing 
out honestly their errors, but as honestly confessing, and 
glorying in, the grace that strove within them mightily. 

Mayence boasts of one other event superior to her 
Rhenish confederation and her prelatic power. Here 
printing was discovered; for this greatest of human in- 
ventions was really a discovery, a providential gift to man. 
John Guttenberg — whose real name, Gansfleisch (Goose- 
flesh), proves the humbleness of his origin, if not con- 
dition — here did that very little thing, cut a bit of wood 
into the shape of a letter. Thereby he became immorta.1. 
It seems nothing, yet, as is truly said on his statue, 
" What Greeks and Romans knew not, German talent 
discovered. So that now in what the ancients were 
wise, and what the moderns, they are wise not for them- 
selves, but for all." Some may like the original. Thus 
it reads : — 

" Artemque Graecos latuit, latuitque Latinos, 
Germani sellers extudit increnium, y. 

Nunc quidquid veteres sapiunt, sapiuntque recentes 
Non sibi sed populis omnibus id sapiunt." 

His statue stands in the market-place, with bas-reliefs 
of him, showing his type to a friend, and examining a 
proof which a workman is striking off; very common 
subjects, such as are seen in a myriad of places to-day, 
but what excitement they caused in him then. The anal- 
ogy between the revelation of Christian life in the soul 
and the greatest discoveries and inventions of man, is no 
small proof of its divinity. Both are so simple that a 
child can understand them. Yet the ability necessary to 
achieve them was of the greatest, and the effects im- 
measurable. Little things are the great things ; common 
sense the true sense. Guttenberg, Newton, Columbus, 
Franklin, all show us that the God of Nature and the 
God of Revelation is the same God. Hence, Christi-^ 
anity is the most natural and rational of all truths, though 
it does not worry you with proofs of its perfection. 



438 FROM WIESBADEN TO MUNICH. 

From St. Boniface and Guttenberg one passes naturally 
to him who employed the spirit of the former and the 
invention of the latter in the reevangelizing of the land. 
But a few miles above Mayenee is the spot where the 
Reformation first became a reality. 

On a hot August day, buried in the cushions and dust 
of an express train, I was whirled into 

■WORMS. 

This did not seem to be sufficiently Lutheran. So 
having the tree pointed out where he made his memo- 
rable declaration, I walked out to it and reentered the 
town in more fitting manner. The tree is a tall, old 
elm, very gnarled in trunk and branches, with a wide- 
spreading top, that makes it a sightly object for miles 
around. It stands on the corner of a clean street, lined 
with very white cottages, of the little village that has to 
carry for its name the heavy burden of Pfiffligheim. No 
wonder it is very small. Such a name would stunt the 
growth of any infant hamlet, even in Germany. The 
tree is at the end of the street, where the broad acres 
open on every side, and straight before us lie the walls 
and towers of the once imperial city. 

The aptness of the story is seen at a glance. Luther 
coming hither at the summons of the Emperor, is met by 
his friends at the very spot where, by a turn in the road, 
the city comes in view. He has yet a chance to return, 
while if he moves forward over the plains, all honorable 
retreat is cut off. He listens to their declarations of his 
peril from assassins and from the powers of the State, 
and their entreaties not to endanger his life and cause by 
casting himself into the den of lions. He looks up and 
sees the den, and most clearly with the mind's eye, sees 
the lions ; sees them to be more than lions, — demons 
gnashing on him with their teeth. But the same vision 



FROM WIESBADEN TO MUNICH. 439 

reveals the absolute necessity of courageously meeting 
these foes. His whole work, past and future, hangs on 
his present valor. You can see the hard, homely, but 
heavenly face illumined with supernal boldness. You 
can hear the manly voice, calm but resolute, uttering the 
words that included the whole matter in controversy, and 
shut off all further expostulation and entreaty. 

The guide-book doubts if the tree really marks the 
spot where he gave the immortal answer. But the 
authorities of Worms have no doubt. A brass plate on 
the tree and an iron fence around it, testify to their faith 
and its fitting works. So I agree with the burghers and 
the ancient traditions, and yield myself to the impres- 
sions of the spot. I walk thence into town, as he did, 
and over the road which he walked, a mile or so through 
an open country, without fence or hedge. Apple-trees, 
bending to the ground under their ripening burden, hang 
over the roadway : fields of yellow grain make a short- 
lived hedge. The flat acres roll out on each side as far as 
the eye can reach, with scarcely a swell on their surface. 
To the east lies the city, with its rows of trees filling 
the ancient moat, and hiding measurably the harsh walls. 
Its Cathedral towers aloft, absorbing in itself as usual 
all the grandeur, and seemingly all the space of the town. 
Beyond, but out of sight, drowsily flows the lazy Rhine. 
This land has been famous in German song. The Min- 
nesingers loved to call it the Land of Joy, and Christians, 
in view of its historic relation to their faith, may not 
deem the title inappropriate. 

Worms itself is now a small city of only eight thou- 
sand inhabitants. They are evidently poor, and the 
whole town has a decayed air. The Cathedral, though 
large, is not imposing. A half-broken wall encircles it, 
and weeds and briers grow in its courts. The inside is 
lofty, but drearily naked, — void of spiritual warmth as 
well as majesty. It seems contrary to our judgment that 



440 FROM WIESBADEN TO MUNICH, 

it should still be in possession of the Romanists. "While 
Zwingle's and Calvin's cathedrals are rescued from the 
Papacy, this is still held in its grasp. It is a barren 
sceptre. No Papal vigor fills its walls. Were the Luther- 
anism around it as vital as it was originally, it would soon 
drop from that withered hand. But Protestant weakness 
makes Papal weakness comparatively strong. 

Near the Cathedral, on its northeast side, are some 
grass-grown walls. This was a corner of the bischopshof, 
or episcopal palace, where the Diet was held to which he 
was summoned. They are all that is left of the edifice, and 
so one has full liberty to rebuild the hall of convocation 
after his own fancy. The spot at least is unchanged. 
Upon it he spote the memorable words, "Here must I 
stand. I can do no otherwise." Here the Reformation 
ceased to be a problem and became a fact. The floating 
fire changed to solid rock. Amid the present weakness of 
Popery, one can hardly realize the resolution which the 
utterance of those words required. When you read over 
Charles the Fifth's statue at Brussels, " Dominator of 
Europe, America, and Asia," you have a slight idea of 
the temporal power vested in the young prince before 
whom he stood. When we remember that by his side 
were the representatives of Leo X., himself the ablest 
sovereign in Europe, whose power was feared and flat- 
tered by every potentate throughout the world, and who 
could incite his followers by all the terrors of hell and 
all the hopes of heaven, the courage of the monk appears 
sublime beyond description. Peter before the Sanhe- 
drim, Paul before Nero, did not require more Divine 
support for the duties of their hour, than did Luther for 
those of his. And the strength was according to the 
day. 

The tiles upon the houses of Worms were somewhat 
numerous. I was a little curious to know how many 
devils Luther was willing to confront. So upon figuring 



FROM WIESBADEN TO MUNICH. 441 

it up, this was the sum. At that time the population 
was 30,000. Allowing ten persons to a house, this would 
give us 3000 houses. Suppose each side of the roof to be 
twenty feet square, that would be eight hundred square 
feet for both sides. Allowing one half a square foot for 
each tile, will give us sixteen hundred tiles to a house, 
which is 4,800,000 for the whole city. Almost five 
million of devils he was willing to face. Such an answer 
must have stopped all further appeals. He looked up 
and saw the red-clay shingles blazing in the sun, and the 
reply sprung to and from his lips. As his friends turned 
their anxious eyes cityward, full of anguish and dread, and 
saw how his daring had overleaped, beyond all compariso|i, 
the narrow limits of their fears, they, too, thanked God 
and took courage. The seeming extravagance of the 
reply was needful for him and for them ! They saw it 
instantly. What were five or fifty million of devils to 
the legions of angels hastening to the spot ! The air 
was full of the chariots of Israel and the horsemen 
thereof. More was He that was for them, than all they 
that were against them. 

None of the tiles exist that were thus, from no fault 
of their own, thrown forever into bad company. The 
city has been bombarded and burnt down so many times 
since, that these victims of a comparison have become 
victims in reality. A Presbyterian clergyman told me 
he picked up one as a sort of a specimen brick of Luther 
and Worms. I preferred a leaf of the Luther Baum at 
Pfiffligheira. The last, in fact, no more represents Luther 
than the first. Both are successors to their predeces- 
sors, though the leaf is an hereditary and the tile an 
elected representative, — the dividing question of royalty 
and republicanism running even through these insensate 
things. 

A ride south and east of a score of miles brings me to 



442 FROM WIESBADEN TO MUNICH. 



HEIDELBERG. 

It was after dark when I entered the University town. 
Rockets were shooting up from thick groves of trees, and 
the steeples shone in the glare. Following the light I 
came to a river, and was greeted with the sight of one 
of the students' festivals. A boat came slowly down 
hung with lanterns along its sides and up its mast, and 
crowned with a huge lantern, while festoons of colored 
lights were draped over every part ; on it were bands of 
singers and players. Another boat attended, firing can- 
non and rockets, making the night bright and hideous. 
They draw to the shore, and a string of torches suddenly 
blazes on the banks. The students form into procession 
with considerable confusion, the torches, carried by link- 
boys hired for the occasion, being arranged on either 
side. A standard-bearer passionately and ceaselessly 
waves his big flag to and fro, the band strike up, and the 
procession moves on. I cannot say when 1 have fol- 
lowed a crowd and a band before, and I little thought a 
troop of sophomores on a frolic could have brought me 
to second childhood. But I was anxious to see the finale, 
and so, though tired and hungry, I trotted after them 
with a crowd of boys, through half dozen streets on 
the execrable paving-stones with which sidewalk and all 
are covered in Europe. When the band played college- 
airs, they joined in with college songs ; at other times they 
were busy in saluting the ladies who filled the windows 
and doors. After marching thus for about an hour, they 
halted in a small square, formed a circle, cast their torches 
on a pyre, and sung a brisk college song. Three or four 
verses used up their enthusiasm and voices, and while 
with extra swinging of arms and caps they wound up 
the chorus, somebody threw a pail of water on the 
torches, and extinguished at once the fire and the fun. 
The students went into a neighboring cafe, the boys to 
their homes, and I to my hotel. 



FROM WIESBADEN TO MUNICH. 443 

That was ray introduction to Heidelberg. Very char- 
acteristic, too, of what I had heard. I learned the next 
day that it was simply a club who were returning from 
a picnic up the river. The crowd that welcomed them 
showed the place was like Cambridge and Oxford, a 
purely University town. The students had the usual ex- 
pression of that class, full of " glad animal spirits," full, 
also, of high intellectual spirits, — not always happily 
united. In some, the animal predominated ; in others, the 
intellectual. Their leaders looked, as such usually do, as 
if they could worry a professor with questions as well 
as with pranks. Their little, vizorless red or green cap 
is a marked improvement on the Oxford cap, which is 
but a Quaker hat upside down. These gave them a 
jaunty air, which would have been rowdyish but for the 
evident superiority of the man over his costume. 

The town is most beautiful for situation. It lies on a 
narrow shelf less than half a mile wide, that stretches 
along the Neckar, under very lofty and heavily wooded 
hills, which soon fall off on both sides to a broad, rich 
plain. The Neckar is about two hundred feet wide aad 
two feet deep. I learned this last fact from seemg men 
on horseback dragging vessels up the channel. It was a 
new specimen of navigation. 

I climbed the high hill behind the town, — an hour 
and over of steady mounting. It was well repaid by the 
mornino;-o;lories I found on the summit. A tower had 
been raised here overtopping the woods. From it the 
eye could sweep an area of hundreds of miles. The 
eastern segment was a mass of hills covered with 
woods. The western was a vast plain, sprinkled thick 
with villages. I counted forty-seven. Had the haze 
been lifted from the horizon, many more would have 
been disclosed. At our feet clung the compact Heidel- 
berg. It has no beauty in itself. Built originally, as 
all European towns were, by serfs to a lord, or to resist 



444 FROM WIESBADEN TO MUNICH. 

invaders, they kept very near together. Ten feet square 
would do for them ; their masters may rejoice in the 
broad acres. A wall, too, must shelter them, and the 
shorter the better defended. On the lower edge of these 
hills, overhanging the town, are the ruins of the castle, 
once the seat of Auch pomp and little power. Its 
grounds are broken up into defiles, precipices, lawns, 
all the varieties of a landscape. Descending, I break 
my fast under its trees, overlooking the landscape below. 
It gave to the dishes a flavor not their own. Across 
the river you see a narrow gorge running up into the 
high hills. A few rods from its entrance is an old- 
fashioned white tavern, not unlike those yet found at 
country corners in the older parts of America. There is 
where the duelling parties daily meet. I walked over 
and took a nearer view. It is in a very secluded spot, 
admirably suited for scholastic or religious retirement. 
The revellers spoil it, as the wicked One does everything 
he touches. Sometimes half dozen duels occur in a 
day. They are usually harmless, though not always so. 
A student was nearly killed the day before. Wine, the 
invisible spirit of rum, is the cause of their being sudden 
and quick in quarrel. It is a great sin here as at home, 
and total abstinence is needed nowhere more than in 
these wine districts. 

The University buildings are only two. One, a plain 
old oblong pile for recitation rooms, whose benches are 
as badly hacked as those of an old-fashioned school-house. 
The other, yet plainer, was for the library. A large and 
comparatively handsome building on the square was built 
by the students for drinking and dancing purposes. The 
janitor laughed when I asked the privilege of going over 
it. As it is called the museum, I supposed it contained 
the scientific collections of the University. "There is 
nothing to see here. It is for eating and drinking," he 
replied. The museums were small collections in the 



FROM WIESBADEN TO MUNICH. 445 

upper rooms of the recitation building. The privileges 
of this building cost the student twenty-five florins — 
about ten dollars — annually. The two edifices stood on 
a paved square, without a tree or an open foot of land. 
The library is in a street leading from it, and some of 
the houses of the Professors are over the stores on the 
side opposite the University. Less buildings and less 
elegant are those of Heidelberg than our poorest colleges 
can boast. It is the continental fashion. I much prefer 
the English. There the colleges are the home of the 
student. It is the true idea. As much benefit is gained 
by students living together, and apart from the world, as 
from their studies. Collea^e life is not lived here. The 
students feel this, and struggle to overcome it by building 
a dancing and drinking palace, by reunions at cafes, and 
in other irregular and injurious ways. They get what 
they crave, each other's society, but they get it without 
the oversight of their guardians. They show a sort of 
college feeling in the place they have chosen for their 
duels. If the authorities would build dormitories there, 
they would stop the duelling, and do much good in other 
ways. 

It is said that the English colleges are aristocratic, and 
tlie German democratic. That is because their patrons 
are. Make England democratic, and her colleges will be. 

Another thing these colleges teach us, — the need of 
land. It is the first and greatest of blessings. No col- 
lege ought to be established with less than five hundred 
acres of land. A university ought to expect and arrange 
to live for thousands of years. That space would be 
filled before hundreds had passed. Harvard College is 
cramped for room to-day, and so is Yale ; and they are 
but in their infancy. We should be warned in time. 
West and East we are founding these institutions. Let 
us do it on one scale of magnificence which we can reach, 
if no other. Let us give them abundance of land. 



446 FROM WIESBADEN TO MUNICH. 

Standing among these ancient seats of learning, I can 
but think of the future of my own young land. The 
institutions of liberty and Christ are to live there. And 
our colleges, the literary expressions of our faith, ought 
to be established broadly and bravely. For five hundred 
years has learning had her seat here. For twelve hun- 
dred at Oxford. Both cities have suffered in civil wars. 
Yet both are peaceful and flourishing to-day. We shall 
live as long. May we live better ! One pardons Cardi- 
nal "VYolsey much as he walks the gardens of Christ 
Church. He admires Cardinal Richelieu still less when 
he sees that he made Sorbonne a prison when he might 
have made it a palace. Sic vos non vohis cedijicatis 
cedes. May those for whom we build, down the long 
generations, praise our wisdom no less than our benevo- 
lence. 

It was near high noon ere I had finished my photo- 
graph of Heidelberg and was en route for the south- 
eastern capital of Germany, the centre of her art and 
beer, — classic and clownish 

MUNICH. 

It is another two hundred miles like that from Paris 
to Brussels, through a like featureless and dusty country. 
We fly from kingdom to kingdom as fleetly as at home 
from State to State, seeing no barriers here more than 
there ; for neither the custom-house nor language divides 
these principalities. We pass Ulm, where the Danube 
greets us. A withered old place it is, with a withering 
cathedral, once the centre of Europe, now dull and poor 
as a slave plantation. Huge fortifications are erected 
here by Austria and Prussia, to keep out the French. 
They will doubtless be as useful as they were before, 
when thirty thousand men within them surrendered with- 
out a blow. Augsburg, eminent in the history of the 



FROM WIESBADEN TO MUNICH. 447 

Rerormation, is forty miles from Ulm, and half way from 
there to Munich. It is also on a plain, surrounded and 
embedded in trees growing on the old fortifications. It 
was once of great authority and wealth. Being on the 
high road from the west to the east, these towns were 
centres of wealth and influence. But the channel of trade 
_^has left them high and dry, as an argosy of the Indies 
f: stranded on the beach. Augsburg contrives to hold on 
to some of its vanishing power. It is the financial centre 
of Germany, and its journal is the most influential in that 
language. This does not interest you as much as that 
■\ here Luther found the devils more active than at Worms, 
and the storm began that only lowered then. He had 
to fly for his life, after his bold friend, the Elector of 
Saxony, had read in the ears of Charles, and so loud, that, 
in spite of the protest of the Emperor, it was heard by 
all the people, the celebrated Confession of Faith which 
was the first of many creeds to which the Reformation 
has given birth. Valuable as a protest against Papal 
supremacy and heresy, it may, and in a degree has be- 
come harmful, as all creeds will when they are adopted 
as the perfect and unchangeable expression of revealed 
truth. Protestants may become Papists, and worship 
the creature more than the Creator, if they do not watch 
and pray against this temptation. The Bible, the whole 
Bible, is the only eternal creed. Yet they must none 
the less beware of the opposite folly of no creed. The 
Augsburg Confession is infinitely superior to the Tiibingen 
non-Confession. It has eternal life within its cramped 
and somewhat distorted trunk ; that has eternal death in 
its boundariless negations. 

Munich, like its predecessors, is on a plain. Like 
them, too, it is bordered by a river. " The Iser rolling 
rapidly," is on its southern side. And very rapidly it 
rolls. It gets its impetus from the Tyrol Alps, not a 
hundred miles off. Campbell's portraiture so far is exact. 



448 FROM WIESBADEN TO MUNICH. 

The city lies in the sun, which seems to occupy both sides 
of every street, from the rising thereof to the going down 
of the same. It is therefore blazing hot, and very dusty. 
Like all cities in vast plains, the greatness of its oppor 
tunities belittles its real achievements. A small tongue 
of land is better than a prairie. Munich could put mil- 
lions on its plains without crowding. Its one hundred 
and fifty thousand consequently look small. 

The last and present kings have expended a great 
amount in beautifying their capitol ; and palaces, muse- 
ums, galleries of art, and statues bear testimony to their 
zeal, if not always to their discretion. The elevation of 
one of their family to the Kingship of Greece seems to 
have imparted a classic mania to those left at home. The 
Athenian Otho shall not outshine the Bavarian Ludwig ; 
so vast sums are expended in building and filling halls 
of art, in adorning churches, and lining the streets and 
squares with bronze and marble efiigies of their unknown 
heroes. There are more public statues in this little town 
than in London. Five in one place, two in another, two 
others in a third, and so on. The chief of these is called 
Bavaria, the largest brass statue in the world. It is 
sixty-one feet high. It is a majestic female, with a lion 
at her side. The land does not favor such monumental 
works. The hills of Athens and Rome helped their ar- 
chitecture : so do those of Edinburgh. This is put on a 
little ridge that rises out of a flat pasture. The grandeur 
of it is lost by its position. And the position itself is 
ludicrous in its infelicity, when it is considered that it 
occupies no memorial position, is a mile and more outside 
of the town, on a spot selected solely because it was a slight 
wart on the face of Nature. A mound could have been 
built up at the head of its chief street, where the monu- 
ment and its surrounding adorniugs could have properly 
stood. Those adornings bespeak still greater folly than 
the chief statue. That in itself is simple, grand, national j 



FROM WIESBADEN TO MUNICH. 449 

these are fantastical. A quadrangle, with one side re- 
moved, is pitched upon the summit of the ridge behind 
the statue. It is an open hall, covered on its three sides 
with busts of the chief men of Germany. In a hall open 
to the skies, and as the background of a sixty-feet figure, 
these busts seemed the more minute ; and Goethe, Luther, 
Richter, and Wallenstein looked like the pig«ny emperors 
at Mayence, under the shadow of their patronizing priest- 
ess. Tile whole affair is not artistic, but artful. Art is 
the child of Nature, and ever respects and recognizes 
her mother. This is not Nature, and therefore not Art. 
Equally absurd are some of the better placed monu- 
ments within the town. Statues of foreign generals who 
fought her forgotten wars, and a monument of her sol- 
diers who followed, by compulsion, Napoleon into Russia, 
are without that truthfulness in which all such works 
should be grounded. The marble multitudes of Paris 
and of Italy are the signs and symbols of an intense re- 
ality ; these, of an intense vanity. Unlike these are 
some equestrian and other statues of their kings ; chief 
of which, for oddity of inscription, is a pillar in the 
market-place in honor of Maximilian I., under which is 
this alliteration, — 

" Eem, Regem, Regimen, Regionera, Religionem, 
Conserva Bavaris Virgo Maria tuis ;" 

which may be rudely rendered in phonetic similarity, — 

" Kingdom, King, Constitution, Country, Christianity,. 
Tlie Virgin Mary preserved to thy Bavarians." 

But if much of out-door art is false, it is redeemed by 
its in-door achievements. The museums of sculpture 
and painting, the library, and the churches, are rich in 
wealth, taste, and genius. The buildings themselves are 
graceful in design, and are worthy of the ambition that has 
changed these salt-works of the monks, fi'om whom it 
took its name, in less than half a century, to the most 
29 



450 FROM WIESBADEN TO MUNICH. 

classic of German capitals, — not Berlin nor Dresden be- 
ing its superior. 

Amid the bewildering multitude two of Rubens' stand 
out with undying freshness. They are the "Ascension of 
the Righteous " and the " Descent of the Wicked." Such 
lightness and such heaviness are seldom brought into con- 
trast. In the first, the air is full of graceful forms that 
seem to be caught up to the Lord in the air. The whole 
movement is like a shower of ascending fires. Eyes and 
hands are upraised ; dress and limbs not impeding, but 
accelerating their flight. Saintly peace gives a spiritual 
elevation to their countenances, and makes it evident that 
the vital force that moves the whole is of spirit and of 
God. 

The overthrow of the fallen angels is of equal, and 
even greater, power. There is a multitude of plunging 
forms : horror, in manifold expressions, sits upon each of 
them. Their angelic strength only imparts swiftness to 
the awful fall. Headlong they dive into the black abyss. 
With marvellous variety of posture, of expression, of 
coloring, they are alike in their precipitateness, heavi- 
ness, and velocity. 

The Library is of unusual beauty, but its chief attrac- 
tions to me were certain autographs. Next to the sight 
of a great man is the sight of his handwriting. More 
than bust or picture is this straggling penmanship ; for 
this is himself. His eye saw it ; his hand did it ; his 
soul was in it. It is a pen-and-ink portrait of his real 
nature, drawn by himself, — an unconscious autography. 
Look at this clean, easy running-hand, neither large nor 
Bmall ; not noticeable for its elegance or inelegance ; a 
hand that as nearly represents perfect thoughtlessness 
of the writing as may be. 

Goethe's character, the most self-controlled of the age, 
looks out from that page. His description of Mannheim 
is a description both of liimself and his hand, so far as 



FROM WIESBADEN TO MUNICH. 451 

his outer and visible nature is concerned, " Das freund- 
liche, reinliche Mannheim." Clean and cordial is his 
flowing pen, with no corrections, as if, like Nature, his 
outgoings were without controversy, unhasting, unrest- 
ing. Schiller's writing was a trifle handsomer, as if he 
thought upon its comeliness as well as upon the language 
it embodied ; still it was almost as neat as that of his 
friend and lover. Richter's was full of erasures, as 
though he would make its obscurity still more obscure, 
or its fancy more fanciful. Talleyrand's was very plain, 
as if he was trying to hide himself in coarse and homely 
dress, seeking to appear careless by the very opposite of 
penly care. Luther's was small and square and solid, 
like himself. Peter the Great's, very large, but in well- 
made letters. Frederic's,- exceedingly stiiff, as though 
the camp had cramped his fingers. 

THE CHURCHES. 

The charm of Munich lies in its churches. Here 
genius has had full sway, and made it the choicest home 
in Europe of modern sacred art. Paris is her only rival, 
and she is hardly an equal. More money is expended 
there, but not more taste. I wander through these 
palaces where God is known for a refuge, — I trust 
the true God. They have not the wonderfulness of 
the Gothic cathedrals nor the sanctity of age. Their 
sole excellence is in their art. One only is Gothic, — ■ 
the Maria Hilf, — and its glory consists not in its pillars 
or arches, but in its painted windows, next in perfection 
to those of St. Gudule in Brussels. They lack the soft- 
ness of those, — the seeming forgetfulness of the artisan 
in the art, and their easy command of their canvas glass ; 
but they are more artistic in design, and may in time 
become as mellow in tone. Their stories are naturally 
told, with the simplicity and grace that characterize the 
modern schools of Germanic art. 



452 FROM WIESBADEN TO MUNICH. 

Less beautiful in its windows and more profuse in its 
frescos are the Court Chapel and Lud wig's Church. 
The last has the " Last Judgment " of Cornelius over 
its altar. The composition is vast and vigorous, but not 
tender nor fascinating. Not so the poems of Hess, 
painted on the smaller walls of the Chapel of All Saints. 
Thev are deeply spiritual as well as beautiful. The al 
tar-piece, the " Father crowning the Virgin," gives her a 
face of matchless sweetness. His. as might be expected, 
is without majesty ; for how can man, except profanely, 
hope to make His likeness and image ? Hands from an 
unseen form should have placed the crown upon her 
brow. The face of Christ is more divine, coming nearer 
Ary Scheffer's ideal than any other of the innumerable 
failures which lumber the galleries and churches of Eu- 
rope. 

But the church of all these churches, the one that lives 
in my memory separate and sublime like a star, is the 
Basilica of St. Boniface. It is an ungainly edifice with- 
out, with plain brick walls, and a front of brick arches ; a 
building you would hardly turn to look upon as you are 
passing by. But enter, and the soul goes out in a rap- 
ture of praise and prayer. It is a copy of St. Paul's 
without the gate, at Rome. It risea to the side of 
Cologne and York, though totally diverse in style and 
adorning. Upon a long, open liall paved with marble 
stand seventy monoliths of Tyrol marble, Iming either 
side of the nave, whose azure roof is studded with golden 
stars. But not its open and sunny aspect allure you ; 
its glory is its frescos. Along the side- walls of the nave, 
above the pillars, stretch a series of illustrations from the 
life of St. Boniface, alternately in colors and monochrome. 
They are marvellous in feeling and power. His " LeaV^- 
ing Home," " First Sight of Rome," and " Burial " are 
perhaps the superiors among superiors. There is nothing 
to be desired in these monochromatic drawings. Saintli- 



FROM WIESBADEN TO MUNICH. 453 

ness, beauty, simplicity, soul, are the elements of each and 
all. Hours one can gaze upon them unwearingly. You 
easily see an unfailing source of Papal strength in this 
lavish expenditure of wealth and art in the service of 
religion. These radiant marbles and more radiant walls 
are proofs of the faith of their worshippers. They show 
their faith by their works. Less far than ours, if we are 
zealous, like St. Boniface, the rather to build souls than 
temples, to beautify man than mortar ; but more than 
ours, if, neglecting this highest duty, we constrain all our 
wealth and genius to the service of self rather than of 
God. May both the life and the Basilica of St. Boniface 
" breed in us perpetual benedictions." 

THE ENGLISH GARDEN, 

which is an American garden, is the most attractive 
promenade south of England ; she herself can hardly 
surpass it. Count Rumford, better known by the plainer 
and more Christian name of Benjamin Thompson, best 
known by his invention of the stove and cure of smoky 
chimneys, was the designer of this delightful park. Here 
the sun gets entangled and lost. His blazing rivers, 
that pour through every street without, whatever the 
direction it may take, give way here to flowing lanes 
and drives, with the Iser still rolling rapidly. That does 
not saunter even through this paradise. Out of the hot 
plains and streets you turn into open gates, and plunge 
into a wilderness four miles in length and half a mile 
in breadth. Lawns, spotted with trees, winding walks 
and carriage roads, miniature temples, seats for rest, riv- 
ulets flying like zigzag pyrotechnics in every direction, 
a broad lake into whicli they at last plunge and have 
rest, — these are the elements of this haunt of beauty. 

The garden, like the churches and museums, library 
and statues, is not born but made. They did not grow 



454 FROM WIESBADEN TO MUNICH. 

from the people but upon them. I saw no crowds, al- 
most no couples, walking here, even on Sunday ; while 
the alleys of the city, and plats called gardens that are on 
the outskirts of these grounds, were crowded with the 
citizens and citizenesses drinking beer. They leave the 
churches largely, the other attractions solely, to foreigners, 
while they attend to the beer. That fact leads us to the 
real Munich, — not that we came to see, but that which 
is, after all, perhaps best worth seeing, — 

ITS PEOPLE. 

Their dress and their drinking habits are equally 
novel. I do not know which is the highest type of 
dress, but the variety is great, and the uniformity of 
ugliness equally great. Sunday is their holiday, and 
their turnouts were evidently, in their estimation, su- 
perb. Some wear the coif of the hair covered with a 
sort of silver bag, — a not unseemly dress. Some tie the 
skirt of the dress almost under the neck, and it hangs in 
close, heavy folds, like lace quilling ; others have a stiff 
basque fitting close to the waist and standing out from 
the body, in forms hard and angular, and set off with 
long chains. It comes but little below the knees, and 
the costume concludes with long stockings, of fancy 
figures in white and black. A stiff Kossuth hat for 
women, with small top or cone to cover the hair, and a 
large rim, is quite popular. More so is a huge fur hat, 
like the bear-skin towers soldiers delight in. They have 
also " leg-of-mutton " sleeves stuffed out, — as if the 
arm had that sheepish shape, — made of bright and dark 
colors, while handkerchiefs of such colors bind the neck. 
The midsummer dress had therefore a most wintry 
aspect. 

Men parade jackets with rows of silvered buttons on 
each side, stuck as close together as possible, the size of 



FROM WIESBADEN TO MUNICH. 455 

a quarter of a dollar, and double rows of the same size, 
equally close, on the waistcoat. These four strings of 
shining silver give them a very glittering aspect. One 
pair, who were evidently got up with especial care, went 
parading through the middle of the street, where every- 
body walks in most towns, with that swell that invites 
and even compels your observation. Having nothing 
else to do, I gave them a moment's regard. A light blue, 
short-tailed coat, reaching altogether but about the length 
of a jacket, faced with four rows of broad pieces, and the 
short tail similarly spangled, white pants, and tall jack- 
boots far above his knees, set off the beau of Munich. 
The belle had a heavy black quilled skirt, tied almost 
under her arms, a flaming red silk handkerchief around 
the neck, many rows of silver chains, great mangy orna- 
ments over her waist, and a high bear-skin cap upon the 
head. 

But one notices that all these oddities are beginning 
to be oddities even here. Most men and women dress 
as they do in London, Paris, and New York. You 
observe these vanishing national costumes as reminis- 
cences of what but a few years ago was universal. So 
is it everywhere. The peasant maidens of Coblentz 
wear a brass knife, much like a paper-folder, through the 
coif of the hair, and pretty silver work covers the rest 
of the back of the hair. But those of superior condition 
follow the universal fashions that Paris dictates. In 
England these distinctions have entirely disappeared. In 
Paris they still cling to caps, and in Germany to bare 
heads, or such eccentricities as the above. 

The great habit of the Bavarians is drinking beer. 
Men and women are seen sitting everywhere over tables, 
with glasses before them that will hold almost a quart. 
In gardens, in alleys, in saloons, it is all beer. Many 
narrow covered walks run in between the houses in the 
old town. These are filled nightly with men' and women 



456 FROM WIESBADEN TO MUNICH. 

over their black beakers. At the city end of the English 
Garden is a row of shaded booths. I tried at most of 
them to find something to eat, but all in vain. " Ich 
babe nicht," was the invariable reply ; " Ich habe bier." 
Beer is their meat and drink. It is the same all hours 
of the day, and all days of the week. It has a very 
bfiastly look, but is only a more disgusting phase of the 
universal European practice. Boor may have been orig- 
inally boer, beer ; and a clown, and beer-drinker thus be 
synonymous. They are in fact, whatever they may be 
in language. You can see that these guzzlers have a 
low look, as brilliant as a mug of their dirty, black ale. 

Not the least amusing sights are the shows. A 
whole street is lined with the penny booths. Their pro- 
prietors stand at the doors describing the wonders within. 
A narrow front parlor gaudily arrayed allures you up 
the steps of the vehicular museum. Once in the ante- 
room, your plunge behind the arras is sure. Creaking 
music adds its enticements. And all this on the Chris- 
tian Sabbath. The holiday begins Saturday afternoon. 
I was amused at a bear scene which came off on Satur- 
day. An old dirty peasant came into the place opposite 
my hotel with an antiquated horse and cart, leading three 
bears, two of them quite large. Halting his horse, he 
proceeded to exhibit the scholarship of his mountain 
pupils. He made them walk on their hind legs, straddle 
a stick, put the stick behind their head with their fore 
paws ; lie down on their back, still holding the stick back 
of their head ; wrestle with his boy ; throw him ; try again ; 
be thrown by him ; and then they roll over and over each 
other as if they were born, and not merely trained, 
brothers. After due exhibition and collection of kreutz- 
ers, he ties his pets to his cart and rides off. I looked 
upon him as the illustration of the witty misreading, — 

" He takes j'oung children in his arms, 
And in his bosom, bears." 



FROM WIESBADEN TO MUNICH. 457 

By his side stood a man with a flock of trained 
canaries. He would put a cap on the head of one and 
set him in a wagon, and make another draw him about. 
Then he covers up their heads, places a torch in their 
claw, and they fire off a tiny cannon ; instantly they fall 
flat on the ground, and lie there as if dead. He takes 
them up still seemingly lifeless till he orders them to 
jump up and enter their cage, when they hop away as 
merrily as boys let loose from school. How many beat- 
ings, scoldings, and starvings . have these little creatures 
had to suffer to acquire so much learning. Not unlike 
the boys are they in getting their education. There is 
no royal road to learning for birds or men. The rod 
and tongue are always the best aids to reflection. 

A pleasanter thing also prominent, is the multitude 
of picture-stalls. Lithography was invented here, and 
the passion for the cheap pictures it produces, I judged 
from the shops, must be very general. Everywhere they 
are found, — hung along the fences, in dark passages, 
at many corners. They were nearly all religious, and 
were so cheap that one could cover his walls at a 
small expense with neat engravings, if he would only 
come to Munich. It is not impossible that this may be 
a national passion, and the king's galleries and churches 
be but the legitimate flowering of a universal senti- 
ment. 

Our last glimpse of the Bavarian capital shall be 
upon an appropriate object, — the last of earth. Walk- 
ing along the bank of the wide and white river a mile or 
more outside of the town, we reach the 

GOTTES-ACKER, 

or Friedhof, — both prettier names than our hard " grave- 
yard." This God's-acre, or Peace-yard, is of two divis- 
ions, the old and new. Both are surrounded by high 



458 FROM WIESBADEN TO MUNICH. 

walls, but the last has along the inner face of its wall 
a covered walk intended to be filled with statues, bas- 
reliefs, and paintings. About a dozen of such works 
already adorn the arcade. 

Another custom is more striking than agreeable. In 
the centre of the grounds are rooms whither persons 
are carried as soon as they are dead, and laid out with 
great taste, in their best dress, and covered with flowers. 
Between their fingers is placed a little brass bar, attached 
to a wire hanging from the ceiling, which is connected 
with a bell. This is done so that they may not be 
buried alive. They are kept there two or three days, 
and then buried. The daily papers announce the time 
of the burial, as does a list also, that is affixed to the 
bulletin-board by the door. I visited these houses of the 
dead. One can go to the glass doors and look in. Many 
were coming and going. There they lie, raised up in 
a half-reclining posture, neatly dressed, and covered with 
appropriate flowers. The expression of all but one 
was agreeable, and some were smiling. Three were 
middle-aged ladies, and one a gentleman. Eight or ten 
infants were there, six on one table, lying two and two, 
under a bed of flowers. I thought they were dolls, and 
had to ask if they were children. The wires were not 
between their fingers. Some had candles burning around 
them, and were laid out in much finer style than the 
rest. The appearance of each was perfectly correct, 
though not pleasing. They do not keep them unburied 
longer than we do ; but they are removed here the day 
they die, and are subject to public gaze, and shut off* 
from private grief. Better trust the aff^ection of friends, 
than the drowsy ear of a public janitor, to prevent a 
livino: burial. The instances of resuscitation are as rare 
here as elsewhere, so that the precaution is proved to 
be unnecessary. 

But the white caps of Tyrol had been long holding 



FROM WIESBADEN TO MUNICH. 459 

me with their glittering eye. Down south, across the 
fenceless plains, their ragged tops have given a vigor to 
the landscape that all the meretricious and costly pompos- 
ities or simple elegances of Bavarian art and architecture 
could not impart. It was a rough golden frame for a 
broad level picture. The Pinacothek and Glyptothek 
grew wearisome. Art is tame beside the glowing hills. 
So we bid a glad good-bye to the charming frescos of 
St. Boniface, the beauty of the windows of Maria Hilf 
Kirche, to the many halls of painting, the shops of world- 
famous artisans, and the everlasting beer-drinking natives, 
whose lack of culture seems all the more barbarian in 
contrast with the splendors which have so suddenly and 
unnaturally blossomed among them. 

The country thither is poor and uncultivated. Forests 
of pines break up its monotony, and give us warning 
of our approach to the engulfing hills. At Kempton 
they throw out their first line of skirmishers, — a low- 
lying corps, with here and there a tall corporal, stand- 
ing erect and threatening ; no poor representative of the 
forces in his rear. The German students in the car with 
me go off into instant and extensive ejaculations, in which 
I can only detect the universal " Ach Gott ! " Being of 
a less impulsive race, and feeling the need of a greater 
husbanding of my enthusiasm, as my journey is to be 
longer, I quietly gaze on the up-running peaks and deep- 
running ravines, gray and green, in happiest conjunction, 
and by my silence escape the profanity into which their 
speech betrayed them. Night closes around us as we fly 
into the ancient, sleeping town of Lindau on Lake Con- 
stance. A full moon sails in the heavens. The waves 
come to the wharf, as I sit leaning over its sides, in rip- 
pling hospitality. Far out on the dark horizon glim- 
mer the icy heads of the Tyrol. The stillness, mild- 
ness, and brightness are overwhelming. While the eye 
sweeps the waters and hills bathed in their moony grace, 



460 



FROM WIESBADEN TO MUNICH, 



the thoughts of Jessica and Lorenzo " on such a night '* 
creep into the memory, and more private and profounder 
thoughts come out of their unuttered depths, and with 
their presence make the hour and place sacred forever. 




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XXV. 

THE CRADLES OF PROTESTANTISM. 

Wittenberg, Dec. 24th. 

^N the railroad depot at Wittenberg, awaiting the 

arrival of the train for Berlin, on this sunny 

I December afternoon, I will try and weave to- 



gether the materials that the last two or three days have 
contributed. The day before yesterday I spent in Prague, 
this day in Wittenberg ; so that only one day separates 
Huss and Luther in my memory. To them and to their 
neglected and comparatively unimportant towns, I have 
sacrificed Dresden, Leipsic, and Berlin; as a desire to 
keep Christmas with friends in Bremen compelled me 
to decide between the historic and the modern, — places 
populous of memory and those populous of men. One 
thing I missed, the Dresden Madonna. I was a moment 
too late to see that. I tried to bribe the janitor to allow 
me a glimpse of it, — shaking a handful of groschen in 
his face, — but he was incorruptible. The reason for this 
unusual virtue lay, probably, in the fact that he was but 
a porter, to whom the keys of the real treasures had not 
been intrusted. I must wait a day before I could enjoy 
the vision. I debated the question in the inner chamber, 
where so many like conflicting problems have been dis- 
cussed, and decided, as a true Protestant should, in favor 
of Luther. A painted object of idolatry, however beauti- 
ful, should not be preferred to the renewer of the face 
of the world. So I wandered around Dresden that 



462 THE CRADLES OF PROTESTANTISM. 

sloppy, drizzly afternoon and evening, enjoying its bus- 
tling shops and stalls, endeavored to sleep with music 
and mirth in Germanic fulness filling the adjoining 
room with glee, left before daylight of an icy cold morn- 
ing, and in an icy cold car, drove through the silent 
streets of Leipsic, and was set down at a good breakfast- 
hour in this then unawakened city. So much weigh art 
and books by the side of antiquities. 

PRAGUE. 

But before I seek to paint this place, let me give you 
a glimpse of its forerunner. They are as unlike in looks 
and history, save that of religion, as any two towns well 
can be. Prague was reached in a night ride from Vi- 
enna. The field of Wagram, which we crossed, looked 
ghostly in the snow and moonlight. The mighty armies 
that there yielded up their spirits were hovering over the 
plains, and the mightiest man of the century rode before 
me in a long gray coat, organizing the victory which, 
only through his own selfishness, became ultimate defeat. 
The morning light brought us to the ancient capital of 
Bohemia. High hills shot up on every side ; the Mol- 
dau lay frozen at their base. Sledges and skaters were 
enjoying the newly-arrived luxury of winter. The city 
lies on both sides of the stream, and a bridge, flanked 
with high towers and lined with statues, makes it one. 
On the southern side are the two city halls and squares, 
famed in the bloody wars of Papists and Protestants. 
Out of each of its halls were cast the electors by an ir- 
rupting mob, upon the pikes of its friends below. The 
oldest square is small, and surrounded by old, high 
buildings. A little back from the side opposite its hall 
stands the central church, where Tycho Brahe's monu- 
* inent is seen against one of the pillars near the altar. 
The church itself is vast, gloomy, unartistic, and crowded 
with monuments and worshippers. 



THE CRADLES OF PROTESTANTISM. 463 

The other and larger square is not less replete with 
memories. Its hall also disgorged its officials, like its elder 
fellow, upon the lances below, and inaugurated, as there, 
a new term of civil and religious war. Ziska arranges 
his forces upon its park, executes judgment upon his 
enemies, and goes forth to that long and terrific conflict 
which resulted in the overthrow of Protestantism in 
Bohemia, and in giving to history three names of mil- 
itary immortality, — Ziska, Wallenstein, and Gustavus 
Adolp*hus. 

On this square, at its opposite end, is the comfortable 
mansion, seeriiingly, of a city merchant, — yellow stone, 
two stories high, narrow windows, old-fashioned, and 
cheerful. This is hardly less renowned than the Hotel 
de Ville opposite ; for here lived Dr. Faust. Here he 
held his Satanic communing, and sealed his pledges to 
his service with his own blood. Goethe completed his 
fame by destroying it. He changed the faithful and rev- 
erent student of the mysteries of Nature, who pursued 
his calling for the good of man, despite man's impreca- 
tions, into one who, drunk with learning, gave himself 
up to intellectual pride and beastly sin, whom the devil 
tempts after the most common manner in which he leads 
the cheapest sinners unto perdition. The house is now 
used as an asylum for deaf mutes, a class that, perhaps, 
is supposed to be beyond the reach of diabolic influence, 
and so can be trusted in the haunted mansion. 

Crossing the river on its towered and statued bridge, 
.and passing under the arches that are crowned by the lof- 
.•itiest and finest of these turrets, we enter a small square 
that contains two very expressive monuments, — one re- 
ligious and the other patriotic. The religious one is a 
monument to the Trinity, — a prism with three faces, a 
triangle on the top, standing on a triangular base. It 
expressed the idea of that doctrine as nearly perhaps as 
mathematics could the highest theology ; and as these 



464 TEE CRADLES OF PROTESTANTISM. 

forms are the ultimates of all solids and areas, it may 
really embody more than at first sight is imagined. 
Nature in her essence may thus be the dim expression 
of its Creator in His. Matter as well as spirit thus 
shadows forth Divinity. 

The other monument is to Radetzky. He is stand- 
ing on a shield supported by seven soldiers represent- 
ing different nationalities. He holds a fla";-staff in one 
hand and his marshal's baton in the other. The sol- 
diers are in various costumes, and their faces are full 
of fire. It is the happiest conceit for such a monu- 
ment, and could be properly imitated in the one we shall 
yet raise to our conquering general. He can be sup- 
ported by many nationalities. The Irish, the Negro, the 
Scotch, the English, the German, the French, the Ital- 
ian, the Indian ; and these not representatives, as here, 
of still divided nations, having only a military and mo- 
mentary unity, but of those who are blended in an 
indissoluble oneness of patriotism, freedom, nationality, 
and blood. 

Climb two hundred steps, more than any other city in 
Europe demands, and you reach the summit of the town. 
Here are the royal palaces, the fortress, and cathedral. 
They possess but little splendor. Since Bohemia became 
a dependency of Austria her palatial grandeur has faded. 
Immense piles of empty walls testify to her former 
orreatness. The cathedral is beautiful for situation ; 
spacious and stately ; though too full of monuments to 
satisfy a rigid taste. One of these, to St. Nepomuc, is 
profusely ornamented. A silver sarcophagus is upheld by 
silver angels, while silver statues stand around represent- 
ing Holiness, Obedience, Discretion, Humility, and Char- 
ity. Other silver angels hang poised above, holding a 
silken canopy over the lustrous spectacle. But who 
was St. Nepomuc, that he should be thus honored ? My 
guide-book does not deign to describe his virtues, though 



THE CRADLES OF PROTESTANTISM, 465 

it dwells largely on his tomb. What they were worth it 
does not say ; this cost two hundred thousand florins. 
Yet St. John Nepomuc was worthy of honor even in the 
city of Huss and Jerome, though of but little real honor 
beside them. He lived in the days preceding theirs ; 
was the confessor of the Empress ; was pressed by the 
Emperor, the brutal Wenceslaus, to reveal her confession ; 
refused, and was cast into the river. Hence his canoniza- 
tion. He is the patron saint of silence, and greatly 
worshipped throughout Austria. How debasing is Pa- 
pacy, when, in the city where the greatest men of their 
age lived and preached, not a hint of their greatness is 
found ; while a priest, faithful to the confessional, is hon- 
ored with statues and shrines of superfluous costliness ! 

But we tire of the vain pomp and glory of the world 
in such a place as this. Not for these gaudy vanities did 
Prague allure our feet. It was to see the home of Huss 
and Jerome, the first cradle of Protestantism. All its 
history can be condensed into those two lives. What care 
we for Charles the Fourth, their chief king and greatest 
adorner of the city, save as the founder of the University 
which educated them ? What care we for Wallenstein's 
palace, which you see under the precipitous sides of this 
Cathedral steep, lying Mke a city of its own near the 
banks of the Moldau ? He would have never been 
known but for the humble priests. They stirred up the 
war which his genius suppressed, and fancied that it was 
extinguishing their religion the same hour. Foolish 
fency. Here he revelled in the wildest luxury over a 
conquered people ; as proud as Wellington over his fan- 
cied annihilation of democracy, and as unwisely proud. 

As we return to the town to search for the few 
dihris of these men, pause on this swiftly descending 
street. Never were there more fascinating features in a 
city landscape. A ravine sets up into these hills. Lean- 
ing over this parapet you see far below the green depths 
30 



4:Q6 THE CRADLES OF PROTESTANTISM. 

of the valley, while the opposite sides spring up abrupt 
but not precipitous. At the foot of the gorge the com- 
pact town clings to the winding river. Around on every 
side rise lofty hills, naked of ornament in this wintry sun, 
but warmly clothed with history. On one Tycho Brahe 
established his observatory, and steadily noted multitudi- 
nous positions of stars and planets for whose maze he 
knew no plan. Only when Kepler's eye fell upon them did 
they put on the comeliness and force of law. Then came 
to pass the saying, " One soweth and another reapeth." It 
is always coming to pass. On that neighboring hill of 
Tabor, Ziska made the rendezvous for his religious war- 
riors, — more fiery and more powerful than the Ironsides 
of Cromwell two hundred years later. A thorough relig- 
ious zealot was he, raised up for the cause of the true 
faith, administering, through his priests, the cup on that 
summit to thousands of his followers, and carrying thence 
dismay and destruction to the enemies of the faith of 
Huss, making himself by far the greatest general of his 
era, — one of the greatest of any era. 

Breaking off these views and reviews, stepping down 
the ledge that overhangs the town, and crossing the 
bridge, a few minutes brings us back to the old Hotel de 
Ville and the Teynkirche. Turn a little to your right, 
twist through the close and high- walled alleys, and you 
reach the real heart of Prague, — the University and the 
Church of St. GaUus. The first is the birthplace of the 
soul of Huss and of modern history. Colleges have a 
high place in the history of Christianity. Wickliffe, from 
the chambers of Baliol in Oxford, kindled the flame that 
caught the searching eyes of the young Jerome of Prague. 
He traced it to its source, went thither and sat at the 
feet of the disciples of Wickliffe, who himself died only 
about ten years before his arrival. He brought the 
sacred fire to John Huss, whose soul was already nurtur- 
ing like seeds of flame caught from Janow, the Court 



THE CRADLES OF PROTESTANTISM. 467 

preacher, and castigator of the clergy of Bohemia, as well 
as from the enthusiasm of the thousands of students in 
the University, casting every doctrine and usage into 
their fiery crucible, and trying every man's work of what 
sort it was. Thus did he feel after the truth, and, slowly 
attaining it, abide in it, serene, undaunted. He was the 
rector, and by his influence gave the college a reformatory 
direction, which, but for his Bohemian zeal, might have 
been the means of preserving his own life and the earlier 
regeneration of Europe. Four nations divided its forty 
thousand students, each having an equal vote. He gives 
Bohemia the preference, and twenty-five thousand scholars 
secede in one day, who found the universities of Leipsic, 
Cracow, and Heidelberg. 

The University is not especially attractive ; nor are 
its memorials of Huss numerous or striking. The Church 
of St. Gallus, near by, is said to have been often occupied 
by him, though his own pulpit was the Bethlehem Chapel, 
which has been demolished. St. Gallus stands at the 
head of a narrow court. Its marble front is rather 
tastily set off with ornate pillars and pediments. Within 
is a long, high, narrow edifice, with only two aisles, the 
floor filled with pews after the Protestant fashion, and 
galleries projecting over the wall pews. The house was 
full. The priest and choir held alternate service. He 
muttered unintelligibly in his dirty robes, and was re- 
sponded to by most intelligible and admirable singing. 
Drawn by its fascinations I entered the gallery. I had 
better have kept away. The choir were chatting away 
as freely as at a picnic. When the moment came for 
their response, they would send forth their thrilling har- 
monies, the director would cry, sotto voce, " bravo," and 
they would subside into their earnest conversation. As 
the service drew near its end, the most of them dispersed, 
the chief singers put on their hats and cloaks and stood 
busily talking, one ear listening to the droning priest, the 



468 THE CRADLES OF PROTESTANTISM. 

other to the more pleasurable tones of their gallants. 
When the " amens " were required they tossed them forth 
with superb vocalization, stiU engaged in their less devo- 
tional services among themselves. The disease is uni- 
versal. Artistic singing, exclusive of the congregation 
and especially of inward grace, is as fatal to piety as 
would be preaching by play-actors and praying by 
dervishes. I gladly escape from the mellifluous pro- 
fanity, and retreat below. 

Leaning against a pillar near the altar, while the 
congregation are listening to the duet of priest and 
choir, my heart listens to the earnest preaching of the 
great Reformer, almost five hundred years before. I 
see the anxious, tearful throngs, searching their hearts, 
confessing their sins, burning with a godly zeal for the 
truth, indifferent to artistic melodies, scorning priestly 
mummeries, filled with the enthusiasm of the Pente- 
costal spirit. That was Protestantism; this Papacy. 
That gave a life that sustained this nation through two 
hundred years of persecution ; this has covered the people 
with a pall of death for an equal period. That gave 
them nationality ; this has subjected them to a foreign 
throne. That put them at the head of European powers ; 
this at the foot. That crowded their University ; this 
has destroyed it. That gave them truth and holiness, 
and made them the most zealous for Christ and His 
Church of any nation before or since ; this has made 
them trust in error, indulge in sin, and become indifferent 
to the cause of God and His Christ. Worshippers of 
images, shrines, and relics are the children of those 
who here listened to the solemn Huss and the fervid 
Jerome ; who flew to Ziska's banner of the cup, and for 
so many generations waged heroic war against their 
incessant, implacable, and ultimately victorious foes. 
Musing thus, the fire burned. How would I have loved 
to have spoken with my mouth, had I had the gift of 



THE CRADLES OF PROTESTANTISM. 469 

tongues, and in their native speech proclaimed the ances- 
tral and divine paths their fathers trod. I might have 
attained the crown of Huss, had I had the requisite gift 
and the still more requisite daring. The last was proba- 
bly less at my command than the Slavic speech. In 
lack of both, I had to content myself with reading the 
eleventh chapter of Hebrews. The audience thought it, 
perhaps, a missal, and me a Papist of especial devotion. 
It was a missal, the word sent forth from God that shall 
not return unto Him void, but shall accomplish that 
whereunto it is sent, even in this despoiled and subju- 
gated community. Faith then and there "lent a real- 
izing light." It was the evidence of things not seen, 
Huss, Jerome, Ziska, the nobles and citizens whose blood 
had flowed in the neighboring square, and whose heads 
and hands had lined the bridge with a grander array 
than its marble statues ; the myriad of martyrs that had 
consecrated with their blood these streets and river and 
surrounding hills with their embracing plains ; these all, 
like those recorded in that chapter, and those to whom 
they were first addressed, and especially like Him in 
whom they all centred, " having obtained a good report 
through faith, received not the promise, God having 
provided some better thing for us ; that they without us 
should not be made perfect." 

I was content. " Thy brother shall rise again," 
sounded through this arch above the wail of the priest 
and the shout of the choir. I saw Huss in the unborn 
generations preaching to earnest followers ; the yoke of 
Italian craft and power lifted from Bohemia, and the 
Slaves, whose sufferings have given their name to the 
bondsmen of all lands and races, with our bondsmen, 
emancipated, united, uplifted in Christ and before the 
world. St. John Nepomuck, the faithful priest of the 
confessional, shall give way to John Huss, the faithful 
priest of God. Then shall the word Slave cease to be a 



470 THE CRADLES OF PROTESTANTISM. 

synonym of shame and assume its original meaning of 
glory. For the glory of God shall be given unto it, in 
the presence of a now despising world. 

The close of the service broke up my meditations and 
drove me without. I saw not the multitudes, who, despite 
the drizzly winter's Sabbath, filled the streets and gave 
the city the aspect of a holiday. I sought the shelter of 
my pleasant quarters, and dreamed dreams of the past 
and the future of this renowned and romantic town. 



WITTENBERG. 

Very different is Wittenberg. The wild banks and 
frozen face of the Moldau accompanied the train well on 
to Dresden. The wilder banks of the Elbe, with the 
mountainous scenery of Saxon Switzerland, received the 
Bohemians, and Wittenberg welcomed me just twenty- 
four hours after Prague dismissed me. That rightfully 
sent me forth weeping. Her skies dropped tears over her 
fate, — wintry tears, that had in them seemingly no vital 
influence. Her spring rains have not yet come. Not so 
was Luther's home. Bright, crisp, and charming were 
the air and heavens and earth. The freezing cold of 
that early dawn not sufficiently satisfying my German 
co-riders, they had opened the windows of the fireless car 
so as to enjoy the fulness of its strength. 

But sunrise raised the mercury in the air and in 
me ; and my torpidity was speedily changed by a hot 
breakfast into an excess of life and spirits. Dresden, 
Leipsic, Vienna, Berlin, what were they? This little 
city outweighed them all a hundred-fold. Here the sun 
rose that we hope shall never set. From Jerusalem to 
Wittenberg is one day. The first faded away into the 
darkness of the sixth century; a night of a thousand 
years followed, and lo ! morn is again upon the earth. 
Here is where its beams first " smote the dark with un- 



THE CRADLES OF PROTESTANTISM. 471 

congenial ray." Its dawn had seemed near in Prague, 
in Oxford, in Savoy ; but they were not the rising. That 
was reserved for Wittenberg. A picture on an illumi- 
nated missal at Prague represents Wickliffe as striking the 
spark, Huss blowing the flame, and Luther holding forth 
the blazing torch. I had been at the universities where 
the spark had been struck and the feeble flame enkindled. 
It was pleasant to be near the one where it burst forth 
into a blaze, that is covering the whole earth with its 
warmth and glory. 

The railroad, as is usual in walled towns, stops outside 
of the gates. For this city, unlike many, retains these 
useless vestiges of the past. It lies on a wide plain, 
with a river encompassing one half of the town, forming 
a natural moat to its fortifications. A few steps lead me 
to the first of his memorials, — the tree under which he 
burned the Pope's Bull of excommunication. It is a 
young-looking oak for so old a history, surrounded by a 
fence, seats, and flowers, and evidently devoted to quite 
another service than that which gives it its fame. It is 
but five minutes' walk from his house, and is as near it 
as any place outside the walls could be. Here the flames 
consumed that which for so many centuries had been the 
means of committinoj multitudes to the flames. It suf- 
fered an appropriate death. Would that Protestantism 
had been always satisfied with such an auto-da-fe. 

The narrow portal, deep sunken in its earthen em- 
bankments, was entered, a short bit of crookedness wound 
through, and a long straight street ran out before me for 
about a mile. On my left is an old, plain pile of stone and 
mortar, gray with years, three stories high, with two other 
stories perched within its tall roof. A court opens in its 
front, along whose farther side is a parallel structure, 
similar, but shorter. In its centre, directly opposite the 
entrance, in the second story, to the right of its door, two 
large windows, set with round panes of many sizes, give 



472 THE CRADLES OF PROTESTANTISM, 

light to the home of him, who, under God, gave light 
to the world. A small antechamber, unfurnished and 
naked, leads into the larger apartment. This is about 
fifteen feet square and nine high. The wide windows 
are deep set in the walls, making ample seats of their 
sills. Opposite them stands a great chah* or cathedra, 
which he used for his lectures in the adjoining chapel. 
His portraits are set into its upper and lower compart- 
ments. In the corner is a black stove, several stories 
high, and large enough to warm a church. A table, a cup- 
board, with his tall earthen mug for beer, samplers wrought 
by his wife, and a cast of his head after death, colored, 
are the remaining contents of the room. Square panels 
are in its ceiling and sides. Here he wrought out many 
of those thunderbolts that rent the Papal Church in twain 
from the top to the bottom. The room opens into a hall 
which he used as a lecture-room, and which is in a like 
state of emptiness, even if densely thronged with mem- 
ories. The buildings looked vacant, though sundry re- 
pairs were going on. The University then was full of 
students and fame. It is now a Protestant seminary of 
a lower grade, the University having been transferred to 
Halle, not far distant. As a monk, he commenced here 
his work of study and reform. In its library he un- 
earthed the unknown Bible, and read its pungent pages. 
Here he felt the stirrings of regenerating life, entered 
into the liberty of the sons of God, and opened the war 
against the sins of the Church, by writing his theses 
which he carried hence to the doors of the Schloss Kirche. 
Here he continued to lecture and write, and was in labors 
abundant and unceasing, with pen and voice, in the pulpit 
and the council ; varying his ceaseless energies with play- 
ful sports with his children, pleasant hours with his hand- 
some and happy Katherine, festive moments with his 
violin, and, not the least, frequent draughts of black 
beer from this huge tankard. Truly these walls have 



TEE CRADLES OF PROTESTANTISM. 478 

a history vital and eternal. The little room is greater 
than Waterloo or Windsor, — than all the rest of Europe ; 
for has it not subdued, or is it not subduing, not only 
Europe, but the world ? Peter the Great's autograph, 
drawn with a pencil on its walls, and carefully covered 
with glass, is but a sample of its influence. The head 
of the Greek Church does obeisance to the founder of 
the Protestant. The head of the Papal will also. 

In the court is a fountain of freshest water, springing, 
after our backwoods' fashion, from a hole in a hollow 
post. The beer was gone, but a draught of this better 
beverage, which he also and often drank, was far prefer- 
able to those bitter stimulants. 

The proper historic walk is, of course, from this 
chamber to the church when he nailed up his theses. 
That was his greatest walk, whose grandeur he but 
faintly comprehended when he made it. The street runs 
straight to the square, passing the house where Melancthon 
lived, a little below this convent, and the city church, 
where Luther often preached. It opens beyond the 
square in nearly the same line that it pursues thither, 
and goes to the wall of the town. On the side of 
the wall was built the castle, and near it the church, 
called hence, Schloss Kirche. It is a narrow, tall, plain 
edifice, with four long windows on each side, its hither, 
or pulpit end rounded, and a tower on the end that joins 
it to the wall. It stands side to the street. 

In the middle of the side, are double doors of ordi- 
nary plainness. Upon them are two long brass tablets, 
containing the theses which he nailed there. A previous 
copy was burned by the French, and this was placed 
here by the King of Prussia. I could see him on such 
a morning as this, though much earlier, quietly stealing 
hither from his room in the convent, where he had been 
burdened many months over the corruptions of the 
Church, and his duty to his Master. The theses are 



474 THE CRADLES OF PROTESTANTISM. 

strongly stated, — are resolutely nailed up. The priests 
come to mass and meet the bold defiance of Papal decrees. 
The explosion comes, and he is cast upon the current he 
must ride to the end. For years he wages the mighty 
warfare, and makes for himself an everlasting name. 
Over the door is a picture that illustrates those times. 
Luther and Melancthon are bowing before Christ. The 
Virgin is excluded, but picture and worshipper yet re- 
main. Melancthon holds in his hand the Confessions of 
Augustine, while Wittenberg towers, steeples, walls, and 
moat form the background of the picture. An old man liv- 
ing opposite lets me in. An aisle crosses the church from 
the door, and another crosses this at right angles through 
the centre. Two rows of pews on either side of this 
last aisle contain all its sittings. In the aisle that crosses 
the church, lie the immortal dead. Melancthon's tomb is 
nearest the door, Luther's not far from the opposite wall. 
In the floor are inserted large marble slabs that tell us 
in simplest phrase what they cover. No burial spot can 
be more quiet or retired. The great of earth lie en- 
tombed in humblest sepulchres. At the age of seventy- 
three, he rested from his labors. What labors ! What 
rest ! In the simple old town where he had been con- 
verted, where he had confronted the mighty power of 
Antichrist ; where he had married, lived, taught, preached, 
and wrote, he fell on sleep and was not, for God took 
him. 

Up the aisle is a narrow altar, on whose table lies a 
cloth, with a crucifix wrought in it. Over it is a cruci- 
fix. Four cheap looking columns, painted green, stand 
over the altar. On either side, against the wall, are 
statues of the two Electors, — Frederic the Wise and his 
brother, — each with a drawn sword in his hand. Galleries 
run, narrow and high, around the house. Its aspect is 
neat and modest, as became the favorite church of the 
great Eeformer. Oppressed joyfully with precious emo- 



THE CRADLES OF PROTESTANTISM. 475 

tions, I linger long in the sacred spot, and reanimate the 
long-departed scenes. I see . the sturdy German, exult- 
ant in his gloom, trusting- in God, speaking the words of 
cheer to his companions and friends. I see him borne 
hither on the mournful day, with weeping thousands fol- 
lowing his bier. The service is ended, and the vault 
receives the immortal dust. Who can say that dust shall 
not live again ? Melancthon Avaits fourteen years before 
he is permitted to see again the face of his master and 
friend. 

In the market-place is the statue of Luther, under a 
little roofed and pillared temple, in his robes, and rough 
familiar aspect. Underneath it are one or two of his 
famous sayings : — 

" Ist's Gottes Werk, so wird's bestehn. 
Ist's Menschen Werk, wird's untergehn." 

If it is the work of God, it will stand ; if of men, it will 
pass away. " Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott," is on the 
opposite side. It was God, not his own spirit, that cre- 
ated and controlled the hour and the man. 

A huge Hotel de Ville, spacious, and homely, covers 
the side of the square behind the statue. Just above 
the northern side of this place stands the large metro- 
politan church. 'Here Luther often preached. It is of 
much ampler dimensions than the fortress church, where 
he lies buried. Why he chose those doors rather than 
these, is a mystery. Its tower gave an admirable land- 
scape, frosty and cleanly, in the December sun. The Elbe 
hugged the western wall. The meadows, yet green, lay 
far and wide in a quiet most profound. The city below 
was almost as deep in slumber. A cart or two rattled 
over its pavements. A few men and maidens aided in 
breaking the seal of silence. But for these it might all 
be a city of the dead. A street runs hence to the gate, 
parallel with the one that we came down. These are 
the two main thoroughfares. On my way to the gate I 



476 THE CRADLES OF PROTESTANTISM. 

enter Melancthon's house. It is a good-looking threes- 
story building, with the inscription on its front, that 
here lived, taught, and died Philip Melancthon. " Hier 
wohnte, lehrte, und starb, Philip Melancthon." A pas- 
sage-way at its side leads you to a side entrance. It is 
used as a school for boys. A bright lad of twelve 
summers acts as cicerone. He takes me into the room 
where he lived and died. It is a wide, high, pleasant 
apartment. Between its windows is a Latin inscription 
telling us that here he sat, with his face turned to the 
north, and translated the Scriptures, which now most of 
the world possesses : — 

" Ad Boream versis occulis hoc sede Melancthon 
Scripta dedit quae nunc praecipua orbis habet." 

In the opposite corner is another inscription informing 
us that here, on his bed, he piously and calmly died : — 
" Siste viator, ad hunc parietem stetit lectulus in quo 
pie et placido expiravit vir reverandus Philippus Melanc- 
thon." 

The passage-way leads to a little garden in the rear, 
where, in a shaded arbor, is a large, round flat stone, 
raised on a base to the height of a table. Here he 
often ate and drank and entertained his friends. It was 
pleasant even on this winter's day, and must be more so 
of a June sunset. 

The ancient convent is reached on the return. I can- 
not leave without one more sight of its historic walls, and 
one more drink of its equally historic fountain. The 
sparkling jet is the freshest example as well as memorial 
of its former patron. How often had it cooled his fevered 
lips ! Like its Creator and his, it remains untouched 
with change or decay amid ever-changing elements. The 
mouthing, malignant priests are gone. The fierce dis- 
putants and the excited multitudes that surrounded them 
are gone. The grave debates on the perils and duties 
of the hour that kept these preachers and their allies of 



THE CRADLES OF PROTESTANTISM. 477 

the State in many a painful consultation, agitate the scene 
no longer. The yet higher deliberations over the Sacred 
Word, when being translated into the mother tongue, have 
alike departed. But this fountain seems to typify the liv- 
ing waters that have here sprung up unto everlasting life. 
Wittenberg is fuller of life than tumultuous Berlin, not a 
score of miles beyond. It is peopled with eternal veri- 
ties of divine conflicts and victories. 

Beneath the tree without the gate I take my farewell 
of Luther and Wittenberg. At the depot I have found 
America a livelier topic than Luther. The keeper of 
its restaurant has been there. Many Wittenberg people 
have gone ; and Luther is being rapidly transferred in 
his people, as he has long been in his principles, to the 
New World that was unveiled to the eyes of Europe 
when he was a lad of nine years. The two revelations 
came together ; they grew together ; they will reign to- 
gether over Europe and the world. Luther and Amer- 
ica will, under God, make all things new. 




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XXVI. 




CHRISTMAS AND HOLLAND. 

Antwerp, Dec. 30th. 

N the noisy room of a public house, on Place 
Verte, Antwerp, I am pencilling my last sketch 
from over the seas. Chattering, smoking, and 
other offences to the senses, cannot utterly drown, nor in 
the least deharmonize, the melody that floats down from 
the Cathedral tower that springs like an angel from the 
opposite side of the little square. Its voice is as rich as 
its form and aspect. Painters have made us familiar 
with the appearance of angels, if they are true daguer- 
reans ; but we rarely think of what must have been the 
tones with which they spoke the rough dialects of He- 
brew and Aramaean. So I could describe, perhaps, the 
steeple, quoting Charles V. and Napoleon, the latter of 
whom thought, as the first had uttered a bright thing about 
it, he must also. Charles said it deserved to be kept in a 
case. Whereupon Napoleon adds his mot, that it is like 
Mechlin lace. It is a very light and graceful framework 
of iron, strung with beads of stone. But the music of 
the angel far surpasses its appearance. How those deli- 
cate Ariels of melody come dancing down into this con- 
fusion ! Every half hour the little bells, ninety-nine in 
number, play several sweet airs, and at the close of their 
concert, the great solemn bell, the Old Hundred of the 
choir, adds the ore rotundo period, like a benediction. 
I heard an artist say that the treasure which, above all 



CHRISTMAS AND HOLLAND. 479 

others, lie wished to bring home with him from Europe, 
was the great bell of Antwerp. No work of art or man's 
device seemed to him its equal. It is astonishingly im- 
pressive. It sounds rnore rich and tender when heard 
in the night. I laid awake nearly all night for the sole 
purpose of listening to the brief oratorios. I thought of 
Longfellow's lines on the Belfry of Bruges, only a few 
miles distant. You remember them. He is stopping, 
as I am, at a hotel almost under the belfry, — 

" A sleepless wight, 
Lodging at an humble inn." 

Read it, and fancy yourself in the clean chamber above, 
under a feather-bed, — 

" Listening with a wild delight 
To the chimes, that, through the night, 
King their changes from the Belfry 
Of the quaint old Flemish city." 

How delicious the fantastic sweetness ! — 

" Most musical, most solemn, bringing back the olden times, 
With tlieir strange, unearthly changes rang the melancholy chimes ; 
Like the psalms from some old cloister, when the nuns sing in the choir, 
And the great bell tolled among them like the chanting of a friar." 

Away from the bells without and the noise within, the 
thoughts wander over the closing scenes of our tour. 
The end is reached. To-morrow Paris will reappear, 
and the cycle be complete. Where can it better end than 
with the festival week ? Huss and Luther fitly forerun 
its Christian joy ; for their faith is both its root and 
offspring. The region just traversed is none the less 
appropriate ; for more than Bohemia and Germany has 
it been the seat of bloodiest wars in defence of tho 
glorious Gospel of the Blessed God ; and, unlike all 
the former and much of the latter, it came forth tri- 
umphant. 



480 CHRISTMAS AND HOLLAND. 



CHRISTMAS 

and Holland are therefore properly the last scraps tossed 
to our omniverous wallet. 

Of Christmas I saw premonitory symptoms at Berlin. 
In its squares were long rows of extemporized booths, 
filled with trifles, costly and cheap, for the coming eve. 
The air rustled with the shivering gold-leaf and green 
tissue-paper, made into Christmas-trees, while the vi- 
vacity and merriment of the hour made one forgetful of 
the drizzly atmosphere in which he was plunged. The 
next day an express train whirled me past the domes of 
Potsdam, the turrets of Magdeburg ; across principalities, 
petty and proud ; under the spectral Brocken, looking as 
tame as ordinary hills, in the disenchanting light ; through 
level Brunswick and Hanover; along the evergreen 
meadows of Oldenburg ; and deposited me, after night- 
fall, in the northeastern-most city of Germany, — Bremen. 

The night was foggy and chilly. My feelings were 
alike dismal. The home I was seeking, I knew not how 
to find. In my despair, I carelessly asked a porter 
where was the Methodist Buchhandlung. " Pastor Ja- 
coby's ? " he replies. How instantly the word relieved 
me, and with what gladness I uttered the responsive 
" Ja wohl " ! He knew him well. Everybody in Bre- 
men knew him. So he picked out a boy and told him 
where to take me. I was brought to a handsome stone 
building near the depot, the Book Depository ; and 
learning there that he lived at the Theological Seminary, 
on Stephen's Platz, he takes me through winding woods 
beside a rushing river, in the heart of the town ; thence 
through some lowlier lanes, and arrives at a three-storied, 
brown wooden house, with a large cottage-house adjoin- 
ing. These are the buildings of the Institute. I was 
soon under the warm roof of the Asbury of Germany, 



CHRISTMAS AND HOLLAND. 481 

and felt that the debate of the day was decided in a mo- 
ment. What were a few works of art, or the piles of a 
modern city, to the joyous welcome of a Christian home ? 

We soon gathered around the thanksgiving table. 
After an abundant feast came the richer festivities of 
grace, — singing, reading, and prayer, — all so familiar 
and fervent that one felt at home, not only in the body 
but the soul. 

Then we adjourned to the parlors, and surrounded the 
Christmas-tree, brilliant with candles and presents. The 
children of the household recited verses, song and prayer 
followed, and the distribution commenced. The special 
gifts were not hung upon the tree, but plated upon the 
table underneath. Each was remembered, and the pleas- 
ant surprises were the happiest features of the occasion. 
A light repast, and the brisk shots of the jesting, which 
is not altogether foolish, and therefore convenient for 
such an hour, made the evening fly pleasantly and prop- 
erly away. 

The next day being Christmas, there was a Sunday- 
school celebration at the church. This is a fine stone 
building that unites in itself church, parsonage, and book 
depository. The chapel was duly trimmed, and a tree 
on a platform before the pulpit was hung with presents 
and filled with lights. The arrangement for lighting was 
novel : a skeleton gas- tree stands within the green one. 
This, once made, will answer for successive years, and is 
an excellent substitute for candles. I commend this 
German- Yankee invention to American churches who 
thus celebrate Christmas. The flags of Bremen, Olden- 
burg (the neighboring State), Switzerland, and the United 
States, hung together over the tree. The children gave 
us the usual melange of a Sabbath-school concert, — sing- 
ing and speaking ; and the whole affair was strangely 
familiar in its foreign tongue. A sermon concluded the 

day. 

31 



482 CHRISTMAS AND HOLLAND. 

But Christmas and Bremen pass swiftly away. "We 
ramble through the city park, with its woods and waters 
and monstrous windmills, — the peaceful conclusion of 
mediaeval towers, whose origin might excuse Don Quixote 
for assailing them, and look upon the mummied faces of 
the ancestral dead, in a conserving vault beneath the 
chief church, — a characteristic of the air and earth, ludi- 
crously tested by poultry hanging from the ceiling, black 
but undecayed. Pleasant homeful faces and voices are 
reluctantly abandoned, and 

HOLLAND 

salutes our coming with tears. Yet beneath its showery 
veil one sees the beautiful face of Nature, which beauty, 
Uke some other veils, perhaps, it was intended to reveal 
rather than conceal. The garden of the world lay under 
my admiring eyes. Egypt alone equalled it in luxu- 
riance. Its greenness surpassed even that of England. 
Quaint towers, square and pointed, shot up from con- 
densed towns ; broad-winged windmills flapped their 
lazy pinions, as they turned slowly and steadily on their 
circuits ; canals crept across the landscape, now wide 
enough to admit sea-going vessels, and now contracted 
to a flat-boat's narrow needs. Huge cattle, the animal 
counterpart of their portly owners, wandered over the 
luscious pastures ; horses, equally portly and slow, dragged 
their lines of boats along the canals. Seldom can one 
see such quietude. Nature, beast, and man, seemed locked 
in sleep. But 

AMSTERDAM 

was awake. It was as bustling as are all such empo- 
riums, where man, escaped from the silence and calm of 
Nature, puts on the boisterous ways of children loosed 
from school. The Northern Venice surpassed its South- 



CHRISTMAS AND HOLLAND. 483 

em sister in liveliness, and, strange to say, in dirtiness. 
The wet weather was too much for the brooms and mops 
of the housewives ; and though many a sturdy dame was 
assisting the rain with her ablutions, the dirty boots of 
the men maintained the mastery. The waters which are 
above the firmament ceased for a season to mingle with 
those below, and gave me the opportunity of seeing the 
town. Unlike Venice, it has streets that admit horses 
and carriages, and so keeps a reminiscence of solider 
earth amid its floating soil. 

The streets that enjoy such luxuries are few, and they 
are crossed by canals as frequent as the streets between 
blocks in our cities. These flow everywhere. In the 
business part they are crowded with vessels ; boats and 
sloops lie along the sidewalks, as they usually do along 
our wharves. Their men are the more vociferous to 
make up for the noiselessness of their streets ; so that 
the animation, confusion, and almost uproar of commer- 
cial thoroughfares prevail here also. Turn from them 
into the watercourses whose fronts are lined with the 
costly homes of the merchants. How perfect the stilt- 
ness, and even beauty. It lacks Venetian art and splen- 
dor, but it exhibits Northern taste and comfort. Four 
canals, a hundred feet wide, bend like a bow in concentric 
circles. Trees border them, behind which, across broad 
quays, stretch the solid mansions of the gentry. In a 
pleasant summer day, their greenness, coolness, and quiet 
must be enchanting. 

I traversed nearly the whole breadth of the city to find 
the Church of the Remonstrants, where Arminius, in 
himself or his immediate disciples, preached his doctrines. 
After much perplexity I tracked it out. It was a gray 
brick front, with two large, long, unornamented windows, 
set in among like plain and neat dwellings, facing the 
silent water-street of Kaiser's Gratcht, the widest in the 
town. It was obscure enough to satisfy the warmest 



484 CHRISTMAS AND HOLLAND. 

opponent of his views ; and is all that was left here of the 
man who has given his name to a school of theology, 
and been the exponent of discussions that have raged for 
two centuries, and are still far from being concluded. 

Next to the humble chapel of Arminius and Episco- 
pius, I sought the great dike that makes Amsterdam a 
city. It is unlike Venice in this respect, that the latter 
needs no defence from the sea. Its waves ripple mildly 
among her islands. But the wrathful Northern Ocean 
leaps upon the rescued soil as if determined to snatch 
back its own. Only labor, wealth, and watchfulness keep 
it at bay. Besides the inner levees, like the inside breast- 
works of a fortification, there is a sea-wall outside of the 
town. A walk of a mile and more from the compact 
city, through gardens and open fields, past a cemetery 
where the black plumes of a funeral cortege were then 
nodding, — showing that the victor of the sea could not 
breathe much longer on the earth he had won than in 
its depths, — and you see swinging around you in great 
curves the immense wall of defence. It is a broad base 
of earth, faced with shale twenty feet high, and capped 
with granite. Standing upon it you behold the " wine- 
colored" deep, tossing far and wide its white crests, cold 
and deadly as rifts of snow. How it would like to 
break this line and rush upon the prostrate town. This 
embankment makes Amsterdam what she is. Let it be 
penetrated, and she is buried. Her enemy is ever at her 
gates. Eternal vigilance is her price of safety. 

I returned to the square, enjoyed the busy life of the 
market, quay, and vessels, and gazed with becoming respect 
on the royal palace, built for a city hall, and long occupied 
by its proud magistracy, but where now 

" Holland deigns to own 
A sceptre, and to wear the purple robe." 

It is only remarkable for the fourteen thousand piles, 
seventy feet long, upon which it is built. In itself it is 



CHRISTMAS AND HOLLAND. . 48§ 

square, tall, and slightly ornamented. But few fruits of 
her wealth have resolved themselves into artistic and 
architectural forms ; so that the canals and quays com- 
prise her chief attraction. A second and sufficient glance 
at these and we turn our eyes and feet towards 



LEYDEN. 

We pass the tulip-beds of Harlem, skim the flat fields, 
within sight often of the protecting ocean wall and the 
assailing waves ; run through hamlets where comfort and 
cleanliness are written upon every tile, — in this respect 
surpassing far its green rivals of England and Egypt, — 
and, after dark, are set down in the city to which Puritan 
and Methodist turn with equal veneration ; the home of 
the Pilgrims, —7 the home of Arminianism. The town 
was explored by moonlight. Such studies are crayon 
sketches, or chiaro-oscuro, in which some artists achieve 
their best effects. The Pilgrim's quarter I did not seek, 
and know not if it can be found. That of Arminius 
was at the University. Determined to see if pale candle- 
light improves such spots, as its kindred moonlight does 
ruins, I pick my way along sidewalks flashing with light 
and life, into a small square, surrounding water, into 
darker and stiller streets, whose flags are as noiseless as 
the waters flowing between them, and in one lined with 
handsome dwellings, fronted with trees, find the object of 
my search. It is after the usual continental style, — a 
single building of brick. The janitor unlocks its gates, 
lights his candle, and takes me up broad stairways to the 
hall for degrees, narrow and high, with portraits of the 
great men of the University lining its walls. Grotius, 
Scaliger, Boerhaave, Episcopius, Arminius, are among 
its treasures. The face of Boerhaave is large, open, in- 
tellectual, and set off with long, careless hair. That of 
Arminius is not unlike, in narrowness and steepness of fore- 



486 CHRISTMAS AND HOLLAND. 

head, America's chief metaphysician, Jonathan Edwards, 
though his beard and ruff have a courtly air that distin- 
guish him from the Puritan of a century ago. Their 
contours show the resemblance which is essential to an- 
tagonism. His lecture-room, which was also Boerhaave's, 
is large and cheerful ; with high pews ranging on either 
wall, and a tall ugly chair at its upper end. Here the 
Tree of Life put forth another branch ; Protestantism 
made a new protest ; and while the father of American 
Congregationalism, Robinson, in the same city, having 
as his especial burden a new church polity, was the 
more zealous in his adhesion to an accepted dogma, 
Arminius, the father of American Methodism in its 
theology, satisfied with ecclesiasticism, felt his work to 
be the larger development of theological truth. Each 
had charity mingled with their zeal ; and^ though Robin- 
son, while declaring that yet greater light was to break 
from God's Word, failed to see the very light then dawn- 
ing, yet he set forth principles that have tended to the 
increase of this light in all the earth. For the inde- 
pendence of every church is but the type of the freedom 
of every soul, and Arminian and Robinsonian liberty 
thus becomes one in nature and influence as in origin. 
It is not a little strange, too, that both of their favorite 
notions should take their deepest root in America, — a land 
then less hopeful than Australia or Africa to-day, — and 
that disciples of each should mutually visit this spot as 
the shrine of their especial gratitude. May they not, 
thus gathering around a common homestead, recognize 
their real oneness, even in these contending fathers, and 
so be prepared to feel a yet deeper unity with other 
bodies of believers at older seats of Christian revival, 
and all exult in an indissoluble oneness around the grave 
of Paul, an'd the birthplace of Him who has said there 
shall be one Fold and one Shepherd ? 



CHRISTMAS AND HOLLAND. 487 



THE HAGUE 

met me with smiles. Her watery ways laughed in the 
sun, like wrinkles filled with mirth. Her clean side- 
walks, house-fronts, bridges, and even boats, looked all 
the cleaner in that morning brightness. Especially spot- 
less were the grounds connected with the royal residences ; 
open, level, rectangular ; but so cheery that one could 
linger long in their company. The museums and gallery 
are, however, the chief treasures. In the former are 
multitudinous gatherings from the East, — Japanese, In- 
dian, and other trophies, that, with their solid houses, show 
at once the enterprise and taste of these amphibious men. 

But the gallery holds the highest place. Here are 
found a few of the world's masterpieces. Rembrandt's 
" Surgeon," is standing, pale and scholarly, over a dead 
body, around which are gathered a company of students 
in every posture of attention and inattention. The man- 
agement of cold tints, almost all white and black, so as 
to give intense life to the canvas, proves him here, as 
elsewhere, one of the greatest of the world's painters. 
"Prometheus," with his hands chained above him, is 
looking down with terrific pain and terror upon a vulture 
pulling his entrails from his side. Rocks, waters, fires, 
and darkness, give the attendant horror. " Sisyphus," with 
his head bowed, has one hand holding an immense mass 
which he is striving to push up the steep ascent, while 
his other clasps tight his forehead. His distress, weari- 
ness, and helplessness, are drawn with fearful force, and 
stamp the picture as a masterpiece of Salvator Rosa. 

Murillo's " Madonna " relieves the gloom. A face so 
childlike and so motherlike, one never tires of beholding 
Her dress is as lively as her features. Red waist, yel- 
low scarf, and green robe, give vivacity to the picture. 
She floats carelessly on the clouds, her face sad and tear 



468 CHRISTMAS AND HOLLAND. 

ful, but supremely lovely. The babe is as babyish as his 
mother is motherly. A sweet, infantile grace blossoms 
in his countenance. The background is a golden haze, 
as if their aureole had filled the heavens with its glory. • 

But the chef d'ceuvre of the collection is not a man, 
nor a Madonna ; they must give place to a bull ; Murillo, 
Salvator Rosa, and Rembrandt, to a painter almost 
otherwheres and otherwise unknown, — Paul Potter. 
He shows how a single deed can immortalize man. His 
bull is placed among the rare few that perfectly com- 
bine both Art and Nature. It holds the highest place in 
this synagogue, where not a few great ones are gathered 
together. 

His majesty is like most human majesties, of no great 
magnitude. He is small for his race, with red neck and 
haunches, red and white face, white stripes upon the 
back ; rough hair covers his face and neck. A cow and 
sheep are under a tree before him. A bearded farmer, in 
an antiquated chapeau, is looking over a fence back of 
the tree. The land slides down from this plateau a few 
feet, and spreads out into a green meadow. Cattle are 
grazing therein, while beyond are trees and a steeple. 
All these are subordinate to the bull. His form and 
face are the most perfect, probably, of his race that were 
ever put upon canvas. Such a vigorous and still purely 
natural expression, in posture, eyes, turn of the neck, 
Rosa Bonheur and Landseer, in their animal counter- 
parts, have never attained. The bull is king of his 
painted, as he is of his living fellows ; and Paul Potter 
may rest content at the efforts of genius to supplant his 
creation. Napoleon stole him, in his other robberies, but 
Paris had to restore him to his original pasture-grounds. 
Thirteen miles fix)m the Hague and we reach 



CHRISTMAS AND HOLLAND. 489 



ROTTERDAM. 

' Delft is on the route, having a twofold celebrity ; one 
for its ware, and one for its being the Pilgrim port of em- 
barkation. The Potter made of the last clay a vessel 
unto honor exceedmgly. Scheidam, of less honorable 
repute, comes next, whose name is suggestive of the 
curse of Holland and the world. To change these 
fruitful fields to poison, wherewith to drown men in per- 
dition and destruction, envelops this town in a cloud of 
infamy darker and deadlier than those which pour forth 
so ceaselessly from its distilleries. This " sad losel spoils 
its name for aye." 

Rotterdam has but few attractions. The slightly roll- 
ing grounds of the park were partly submerged by the 
tides. The statue of " Erasmus " is in the market-place, 
in a student's cap and gown, with book in hand, in 
scholarly contrast to its marketwomen and confusion. 

The steamer takes me willingly from its broad and 
handsome quay. Dort soon appears on the opposite 
bank. Its tall, square steeples recall the synod that 
emulated antecedent councils in seeking to solve the 
insoluble, to resist the irresistible, hoping to dike the 
Atlantic of progress from the Church as completely as 
its counterpart had been kept from their farms. The 
Church has largely outgrown the conceit, which, from the 
days of Nice to that of Dort, possessed her, that bodies 
of brethren, however wise and holy, could combine sym- 
bols of faith after which all ages must fashion their souls. 
The simple creed of Peter, " Believe on the Lord Jesus 
Christ, and you shall be saved," vsdll yet be the only 
stone, as it is the corner-stone, of true faith and salva- 
tion. 

Flat and meaningless scenery glided slowly past us, 
and darkness closes us in ere we set foot on this once 
commercial capital of the world. 



490 CHRISTMAS AND HOLLAND. 



KUBENS 

has his home here. His paintings elsewhere are but the 
dispersion of rays from this centre. Yet even here his 
works are few. A half dozen comprise the treasure, and . 
of these three only are masterpieces, — " The Crucifix- 
ion," " The Elevation of the Cross," and « The Descent 
from the Cross." Each is remarkable. In the first, the 
soldier piercing, the centurion directing, the thieves, one ^ 
of whom has torn his foot from the nail in his agony, 
even the horses themselves, are wonderfully expressive ; 
while John leaning on Mary's shoulder, the Mother, her- 
self with her hands clasped, looking agonizingly upward, 
and the Magdalen clinging to His feet and shudderingly 
beholding the horseman with his death-compelling spear, 
are ail too deep for tears. 

" The Elevation of the Cross," as " The Descent," are 
known to every eye through their engravings, though 
this art leaves out entirely that color in which Rubens, 
next to Titian, of all painters excels. His canvas is a 
living flame. What energy leaps from the strained arms 
and flushed faces of the servants swinging the cross into 
its place, while the helpless calm of the Saviour, swaying 
with the swaying cross, gives their furious vigor its 
needed and superior repose ! 

Equally astonishing is " The Descent." Hanging in 
the gk)om of the great arches, you almost feel as if the 
awful spectacle were passing before your eyes. The 
drooping, languid frame, heavy with death ; the sad 
anxiety of those who, leaning over the cross, are letting 
Him sacredly down ; the like tenderness and anxiousness 
of those who are supporting Him from beneath ; the sad, 
but not idle women ; the deathliness of the body, as con- 
trasted with the linen cloth in which He lies and is to be 
enwrapped, — combine in a composition of force and 



CHRISTMAS AND HOLLAND. 491 

softness, of color and colorlessness, of death and life, 
such as few paintmgs rival and none surpass. 

AU REVOIE. 

At Christ and His cross our wanderings may well 
cease. Before His agony and bloody sweat, His dying 
and death, we stand, we fall, in silent love and adora- 
tion. Our goal may have had to yield to our starting- 
place the prize of commerce ; the twenty-five hundred 
vessels that have lain together at her wharves may be 
transferred to the Mersey ; grass may creep into sight 
upon her pavements ; her population may flow, a thin 
current, through her streets ; but in the days of her 
prosperity she gave of her treasures freely to the Church, 
and for these gifts she now receives abundant recompense. 
They are her glory and her life. The painter and the 
architect assure her immortality. Rubens, Matsys, Van- 
dyke, make her walls glow with consecrated genius ; while 
from her heart springs, graceful and grand, her sublime 
Cathedral, an eternal monument. Its branching roof and 
lofty pillars abide in solemn beauty. From its towers 
float upward and downward, as if to unite earth and 
heaven, notes that might fittingly call the General Assem- 
bly of both earth and heaven to a celestial congregation. 
Have you not heard them relieving, often, our dull dis- 
course with their rare vibrations ? As you listened, when 
stillness had come over the loquacity of our guest-house, — 

" And the evening shades descended, 
Low and loud, and sweetly blended ; 
Low at times, and loud at times, 
And changing like a poet's rhymes, 
Eang the beautiful wild chimes. 
Then, with deep, sonorous clangor, 
Calmly answering their wild anger ; 

When the wrangling bells had ended, 
Slowly struck the clock eleven, 
And, from out the silent heaven. 

Silence on the town descended." 



492 CHRISTMAS AND HOLLAND. 

Under the shadow of that hour, with the rain of mel- 
ody falling upon us as the gentle dew from heaven, we 
must separate. I addressed you at the beginning as 
unknown. But the long journey we have taken together 
has made us friends and brothers. In the words of one 
who has glorified much of the region we have traversed 
with his genius, may I say, — 

" Ye who have traced the Pilgrim to the scene 
Which is his last, if in your memories dwell 
A thought that once was his, if on ye swell 
A single recollection, not in vain 
He wore the sandal shoon and scallop shell." 

As friends, we may hope that it will not be our last com- 
munion. Let not the fatal " farewell " sound as the knell 
of our perpetual separation ; but let that word, the rather, 
that betokens a reunion, and is at once a valediction 
and a prophetic benediction, assuring a re-seeing either 
through this medium on earth, or with open vision 
above, both part and unite us with its vale salveqtie, — 
au revoir. 




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